Progress!

Things are finally coming together! I’ve started putting all of the vector and Flash images together in After Effects finally and it looks awesome. I changed the design of the car to something that I think looks better in a minimalistic sense. It is based off of an Aston Martin DB5, which is pretty much my favorite car ever. Its colors match the jet better instead of going from straight grey to bright blue. It’s really satisfying to see things start to come together since I felt like the Flash animation was taking far too long with little reward. I’m going to post a video of the rough stuff later and then I’ll post another one before my image check next week. It’s an ambitious goal but I’d like to have 75% of my stuff put together by then. I imagine the t-rex walk will take the longest and I’ll probably leave that as the last bit of primary animation. I want it to look good and I don’t wanna rush it so I’d like to be able to dedicate about 2 or 3 days to it to get everything right. I’m still in contact with professor Markowski and I’m hoping to meet with him later this week to discuss details. At this point I’m thinking I’m gonna scrap the music overlay idea or at least make it a faint instrumental track to focus on little details. I’m still looking into marketing ideas at this point. I’m thinking that while I would love to submit to animation-only festivals, broader festivals would be a good idea too. Going off of the logic that we used for visions, the animations are typically shorter than everything else and light hearted so we didn’t have to be as tight about what we kept. Whereas if I submitted to a pure animation festival, while there may be a lot more opportunities to network and get my stuff out there, I believe it will be much harder to get in. My work would likely get scrutinized against other animations in terms of the quality of the animation and other factors to a much greater degree. Any way these are just my thoughts on the assignment at this point.

Good News!

I feel like lots of my recent posts have been about things going wrong on my project, Well not this time! As per Shannon's suggestion, I emailed Professor Markowski about doing sound design for my project. He responded by saying that yes he would love to help and tat it sounds fun and as long as it doesn't take too much of his time he ay do it for free! After so many setbacks this is awesome! Also, most of my flash animation is now in its rough draft state. I'm going to go through and polish everything up for class tomorrow so everyone can see how some of the final animation is supposed to look. There are only a few scenes I want to do purely in flash that aren't complete, these are the t rex running across the screen and the surfing bit. I have decided to remove the scuba diving bit as I though it screwed up the pacing quite a lot. Instead I'm gonna have the guy eject out of his sub and shoot out of the water and land on his surfboard.I know it seems a little b-movie ish but that's why I want it. I'm gonna turn the ridiculousness knob all the way to 11. In terms of the surfing i have about a second of it done but it, like the t rex is a lot harder than I originally thought. It's getting there but It won't be ready for class tomorrow which is kind of a bummer, but focus on the positives!

Post-image Check 1

So I think things are going decently at the moment. I was thinking that I was super behind for the past week or two but I may have been over-exaggerating. I came to the realization the other day that it is not necessarily that I haven't done the Flash animation I said I would, I mean I am a little behind on some of that but I have also switched a lot of what I originally thought I would be doing in After effects in Flash. Some scenes (the car, the plane, the mechanical bull, the minisub, the stampede, and the pennyfarthing) will be done in After effects but basically anything that involves a lot of movement from the guy I'm gonna do in Flash. I've never really liked how vector animation looks because unless you're really careful with your key frames it looks stiff. You also can't easily manipulate in 3D, like body rotation and stuff like that. So my baseline goal for next week is to have the mountain climbing scene finished (probably @ 75% right now) and the T-rex bit of the mechanical bull scene. Funnily enough there is actually a hell of a lot more reference material for a T-rex than there is of a person mountain climbing. That being said, I want to have more than this done and likely will. I still need to do surfing and scuba diving which ideally I would have done. Then I will move onto the vector animation for the vehicles. the typography aspect is gonna keep me satisfied in terms of the original design of the project. I wanted to do a motion design project and instead it has more or less turned into a Flash animation but If I can play around with the typography aspect I'll be okay with deviating so much. Looking at it glass half full, it just adds more variety to my animation for a challenge and also for future employers. The main thing I am concerned about is blending the two styles. I'll have to make some changes to where I was gonna put some of the text or something. The main thing I was thinking about earlier was the flag specifically. I can't flash animate that and put text on top because it'll be super obvious it's just a layer on top of another. A thought I had was to find a cloth animation in after effects and use that, that way I can probably use the same settings/formula for the text layer to make it deform the same way. Unfortunately this is something I would need the edit lab for because my computer would probably burst into flames if I try to render it at home.

Animation underway!

I'm so excited to finally be animating. The pre-production stages were tedious but presenting the animatic in class was a great feeling. It was awesome to see everything come together like that and I can't wait to see how everything comes together towards the end of the semester. Like any shcedule, there are somethings that have changed since I made my schedule. I negated to consider Spring Break into my plans and as such am behind where I would like to be. I think getting all of the hand-drawn animation done in two weeks was a bold goal and it was too bold as it turns out. I've got some stuff done but not nearly as much as I had wanted. My main reasoning for the timing was to hit each of the image checks with a lot of stuff to show. I do however have a crafty plan. I still want a majority of the animation done by the 2nd image check but if I hire a sound designer like Shannon suggested, that will free up and extra week and a half or so for more animating. I'm kinda bummed I won't have some solid things but the run cycle is a rough draft right now,  and the jet pack bit should be ready too. Ideally I'd like to have the rock climbing, swimming, and skydiving bits done too but we'll see about that. I'm not worried about the project as a whole, once I get into a solid routine things should get done nicely.

Animatic

Here's the link to my animatic with rough sound. I've already noticed a a couple of problems with it but I can deal with that later.

Problems

- Pacing with dinosaur
- Forgot Tattoo scene
- race pacing
- there's probably some more but I'm having a brain fart, I'll update later

https://vimeo.com/87648609

 As a result of my last discovery, I am thinking about moving my schedule round and start with the Flash animation. I think it will be easier to adapt the After Effects images to the Flash rather than the other way round.

Another Snag

While making my animatic I have found another super fun problem. My plan was to originally composite flash into after effects, or vice versa. However, although you can bring photoshop and illustrator files into AE, Flash and AE are not compatible in the same way. I can still use the two programs and I can put the flash into After effects but the flash file has to be exported first. This is going to complicate things as I cannot make small changes quickly because I'll have to do them and then export the file and drop it into AE. not only is this going to be time consuming, it is also really annoying. As a result I may end up doing more of this in flash than I had originally planned. Fortunately I left about 1 1/2 weeks after I wanted to have the main animations done for corrections so I can use that time to properly fine tune the final product. I have also learned that my computer is not able to render my files well so I'll have to work around the edit lab times to export over there. Despite these problems I will have the animatic up on vimeo by tomorrow night, or before class on wed. at the very latest.

New artwork!

I've got some new artwork I've been working on. Unfortunately I've hit a bit of a snag. Like I've been posting for the past few weeks I cannot get my things to look the way I want them too and its driving me bonkers. I've got a plane and a mechanical bull but they still don't look exactly how I want, I've been trying to get that grain effect I posted the other day but it just isn't working.

These are close to want I want in terms of a minimalistic style but they're missing that texture I really want.