Early CGI Animation Session

I have now watched some of the short films of early CGI that I missed in the screening session.
Panasonic 'Glider' directed by Robert Abel 1981, the paper glider planes flying through mesh buildings, smooth animation but rather monotonous.
Macintosh 'Pencil Test' 1988, a clinical film, simple graphics but I liked the link between crosssing over from hand drawn work to computers. As I discovered computers quite late I missed the developement stages of computers and what they allowed peolple to do for leisure and work and this short film seems to sum up the bridge between the two mediums.
'Megacycle' directed by Don Mitchell 1989, this film was rather depressing to watch because of the monotony and the thought that life could be so mundane as nothing more than a series of the same path travelled by people who are all the same, with no distinguishing features. It is very clever but over whelming, reminicent of Kraftwerk music videos.
I watched some other films on the Computer Generated Classics DVD but found most of them used the same themes of monotony and continuity, some were interesting, like the Rolling Stones video using real footage of the band with computer image figures interacting with them. The figures were imaginative as they were just coloured lines, very fluid and transparent so you could see everyting else behind them. Probably looks dated now but it still seems clever to me......

Flash - Lip Sync Session

This session was great! When Andy was demonstrating the lip sync in Flash I thought well this doesn't look too bad, but it is harder to do than it looks! Getting to know a small part of Flash is bad enough, but I did really enjoy it when I eventually got going.
The session worked well because of using drawings that were already done, and so you could experiment quite easily, once you had got over the initial timing of the frames to the sounds of the vowels and the consonants. It is difficult to identify where the sound falls, ie; on what frame, but after trial and error it seemed to work.
I hope the 'Lola' version I did worked Ok, it looked fine to my untrained eye.

I really enjoyed the session and I am looking forward to doing the face lip sync but not the self portrait bit! I think it is going to be harder to do because of having to create all the mouth postures as well as synchronise.

'Lola' (lip sync by a novice)

After Effects Session

Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects all on the same day, well this really did stretch my small brain and computer experience to the limit.
I am afraid I did not enjoy this session at all, it really wasn't planned well in my humble opinion. For anyone who is experienced at any of these programmes already, and there seemed to be quite a few who are, then it was fine, but I really struggled to follow what was being taught. The tutorial notes to follow were very confusing, if an operation has 4 parts to it then only 2 parts were explained, there aren't consistent names for the files through the sections, when there are more than one area for lists of files in the programme it isn't clear which list is being referred to, there is too much chat about what you are about to do, so that you are reading unnecessary sentences, and I could go on. People were at different stages by the end of the day and at one point no one knew what programme to open next.

I will say that I wasn't in the best frame of mind yesterday as I was very tired from finishing the projects but it wasn't made any easier by the style of tutorial. Maybe I have a different way of learning as I felt more comfortable with the Maya and Flash sessions using the large screens to project the programme. I know this was difficult for some people who were sat at the back though.

I think I am the only one who had a problem with the session but unfortunately I really did have a problem. So I just hope it gets better in the next session.

Flash

I just want to know all this stuff now, only a slight amount of impatience there. A really good learning session, I liked way the information was put across, as some one tried to show Flash to me once and it didn't make sence so this was a relief.

I really want to get used to the drawing tools in Flash and feel confident using them, but I know this will take time for me as I am not quick at learning new programmes. I liked using the brush tool to draw with freehand and using the 'wacom' pen produces a different effect, so I want to spend a lot of working on this at home.

Flash looks very complicated and is but I am looking forward to getting to grips with it.