Thursday, 5 June 2008
Group Project: Post Production
Editing and Sound
I continued to work on the elphant t-shirt project to do editing, foley and and compositing.
We recorded some sound effects for the elephant ( James is now the voice of the little blue elephant!) and edited the results in Audition. There are 6 sounds in all, including a drumroll, nervous 'oooohs' for the elephant and audience applause. This took quite a while to do, trying to get some atmosphere and character into the final film. But I am sure a proper 'sound man' would have done a much better job!
The final stage of exporting was a painful process, it turned out that the original Flash file was over a GB in size for some reason, so the rendering was taking over 2 hours. So in the end I exported the Flash files as a PNG image sequence, which was of more normal size and then could render from Premiere in a few minutes.
I enjoyed working with Charlotte as producer, as she helped when I needed her to do something and left me alone when I needed to just get on with things as I wished to.
Things I learnt:
More timing in animation, as just reading about it in thoery doesn't get it into your head, only doing it does that.
How not to work with too many images from hand drawn to computer vectors, there must be another way. . .
Some stuff about rendering but this is still a mine field.
And how I am not too good at sound
I continued to work on the elphant t-shirt project to do editing, foley and and compositing.
We recorded some sound effects for the elephant ( James is now the voice of the little blue elephant!) and edited the results in Audition. There are 6 sounds in all, including a drumroll, nervous 'oooohs' for the elephant and audience applause. This took quite a while to do, trying to get some atmosphere and character into the final film. But I am sure a proper 'sound man' would have done a much better job!
The final stage of exporting was a painful process, it turned out that the original Flash file was over a GB in size for some reason, so the rendering was taking over 2 hours. So in the end I exported the Flash files as a PNG image sequence, which was of more normal size and then could render from Premiere in a few minutes.
I enjoyed working with Charlotte as producer, as she helped when I needed her to do something and left me alone when I needed to just get on with things as I wished to.
Things I learnt:
More timing in animation, as just reading about it in thoery doesn't get it into your head, only doing it does that.
How not to work with too many images from hand drawn to computer vectors, there must be another way. . .
Some stuff about rendering but this is still a mine field.
And how I am not too good at sound
Group Project: Production
Production - Animation
Animation of 'Aaaargh Nuts': I decided to do the animation for the elephant using traditional method of animation with drawings on peg paper, for two reasons, one, that I felt I could work out the timing better and two, that I wanted to get some fluid movement into the elephant which I didn't feel confident I could achieve in drawing straight onto the computer.
I decided to use peg paper to do the animation as I thought I could achieve the movement I wanted better, it had been a while since doing the animation practice exercises in the first term, so it took a while to get into it again. I don't think I could have done the movement straight into Flash in the same way and I didn't want to have a cut out, dis-jointed look to the animation.
So althought it was a good way for me to work it was a long way round, and the scanning followed by converting all 207 frames was annoying.
I had hoped that by using the scanned bitmap images and converting them to vectors rather than drawing them as vector, as I did for the OSTN project, that I would cut down on the work load and therefore it would be quicker. But unfortunately the conversion process did not go smoothly! The scanned images picked up some marks on the paper from rubbed out lines and so when converted and coloured in there were gaps left which needed to be filled in manually, this added so much time to each frame and felt like my life was ebbing away. The lines of the drawings became grey and not a smooth line, so I think I just don't have the experience to have known how to sort the settings out. The converted images didn't look as I would have liked in the end.
It was difficult to get the positioning of all the frames into the right place, I used a box drawn around the animation to act as a guide but this didn't always work and the animation jumps around a little.
I would have liked to use more movement in the body as well as just certain parts, but getting everything to move at the right time is difficult.
I was satisfied with the line test but less so with the Flash test, due to the scanned converted image artwork.
I do enjoy using the hand drawn peg paper process, but getting to the computer stage sometimes is less satisfying.
Animation of 'Aaaargh Nuts': I decided to do the animation for the elephant using traditional method of animation with drawings on peg paper, for two reasons, one, that I felt I could work out the timing better and two, that I wanted to get some fluid movement into the elephant which I didn't feel confident I could achieve in drawing straight onto the computer.
I decided to use peg paper to do the animation as I thought I could achieve the movement I wanted better, it had been a while since doing the animation practice exercises in the first term, so it took a while to get into it again. I don't think I could have done the movement straight into Flash in the same way and I didn't want to have a cut out, dis-jointed look to the animation.
So althought it was a good way for me to work it was a long way round, and the scanning followed by converting all 207 frames was annoying.
I had hoped that by using the scanned bitmap images and converting them to vectors rather than drawing them as vector, as I did for the OSTN project, that I would cut down on the work load and therefore it would be quicker. But unfortunately the conversion process did not go smoothly! The scanned images picked up some marks on the paper from rubbed out lines and so when converted and coloured in there were gaps left which needed to be filled in manually, this added so much time to each frame and felt like my life was ebbing away. The lines of the drawings became grey and not a smooth line, so I think I just don't have the experience to have known how to sort the settings out. The converted images didn't look as I would have liked in the end.
It was difficult to get the positioning of all the frames into the right place, I used a box drawn around the animation to act as a guide but this didn't always work and the animation jumps around a little.
I would have liked to use more movement in the body as well as just certain parts, but getting everything to move at the right time is difficult.
I was satisfied with the line test but less so with the Flash test, due to the scanned converted image artwork.
I do enjoy using the hand drawn peg paper process, but getting to the computer stage sometimes is less satisfying.
Monday, 2 June 2008
Group Project: Pre-Production
Moonut T-shirts project - Elephant on Diving Board
I worked on several thumbnail storyboards for various t-shirt designs with the team and then drew up 2 design concept ideas in more detail to submit to the client.
The 'Aaaargh Nuts' idea was accepted with some ammendments to the story. Following on with some character drawings and colour tests using illustrator.
I worked on several thumbnail storyboards for various t-shirt designs with the team and then drew up 2 design concept ideas in more detail to submit to the client.
The 'Aaaargh Nuts' idea was accepted with some ammendments to the story. Following on with some character drawings and colour tests using illustrator.
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
Maya Animation
The jury is still out on maya animation. I think I got the hang of the programme and I can think in 3D, but at some point it all got very complicated and life seemed a bit too short!
Doing the ball bounces was fun. . ish, and I felt I understood what was going on with the key frames, the graph editor and some form of animation timing.
The flour sack was a completely different thing altogether, maybe because when you are animating it you want control of what bits move and how, which means you would have to do the rigging yourself. I decided not to use a cycle for the walk because it is very difficult to get rid of the sliding appearance, the limp walk ended up being a bit too slow, I thought I could use the graph editor to move the key frames closer together, but unfortunately this send everything off sequence. . .so that didn't work. I was satisfied with the walk though as I had one foot turned forward with his heel lifting and his toe slapping down and the other dragging behind which took a lot of limping round my living room! The jump was really difficult to do as things started to go haywire, parts of him were being left behind, so after losing some patience the jump and landing are not what I had planned. . .but at least it got finished. I could get into it more but it would just take a lot of practice.
Doing the ball bounces was fun. . ish, and I felt I understood what was going on with the key frames, the graph editor and some form of animation timing.
The flour sack was a completely different thing altogether, maybe because when you are animating it you want control of what bits move and how, which means you would have to do the rigging yourself. I decided not to use a cycle for the walk because it is very difficult to get rid of the sliding appearance, the limp walk ended up being a bit too slow, I thought I could use the graph editor to move the key frames closer together, but unfortunately this send everything off sequence. . .so that didn't work. I was satisfied with the walk though as I had one foot turned forward with his heel lifting and his toe slapping down and the other dragging behind which took a lot of limping round my living room! The jump was really difficult to do as things started to go haywire, parts of him were being left behind, so after losing some patience the jump and landing are not what I had planned. . .but at least it got finished. I could get into it more but it would just take a lot of practice.
Thursday, 24 April 2008
Storyboarding and Scriptwriting
I enjoyed these assignments, but don't know if I am any good at either of them.
Storyboarding the 'Mark and Kevin' story:
I liked the process of drawing up the scenes and it seemed relatively straight forward. After I had finished though I thought one of the scenes should have been done differently. Following the close up of Mark with a fist, I think should have been just a close up of his fist filling the screen, but I did a profile shot instead....oh well.
Scriptwriting:
This was quite difficult to do at first as I tend to write in book form as a story, so trying to just write the essentials stumped me for a while. Ben suggested drawing the storyboard first which I did, and this made an amazing difference. In drawing out the story I got all of the discriptive stuff out of my head and wrote all the camera angles and cuts for the scenes, which I could then just use for telling the story in script form. I think it is 100 times better than my other attempts, but then I did start from a low point so anything from there was up! Don't know if it is any good as a script, a story or as a storyboard, I am just relieved at getting a result.
Storyboarding the 'Mark and Kevin' story:
I liked the process of drawing up the scenes and it seemed relatively straight forward. After I had finished though I thought one of the scenes should have been done differently. Following the close up of Mark with a fist, I think should have been just a close up of his fist filling the screen, but I did a profile shot instead....oh well.
Scriptwriting:
This was quite difficult to do at first as I tend to write in book form as a story, so trying to just write the essentials stumped me for a while. Ben suggested drawing the storyboard first which I did, and this made an amazing difference. In drawing out the story I got all of the discriptive stuff out of my head and wrote all the camera angles and cuts for the scenes, which I could then just use for telling the story in script form. I think it is 100 times better than my other attempts, but then I did start from a low point so anything from there was up! Don't know if it is any good as a script, a story or as a storyboard, I am just relieved at getting a result.
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