This afternoon we had to present our idea(s) for the ident project infront of Andy, Derek and the rest of our class. I haven't really written about the ident project, so I'll give a brief overview: we have to create a 10-15 second clip to promote a new music website from Virgin, The Red Room. The brief was basic, so we could pretty make up anything we wanted. The rest of the class had some really wide range of cool ideas and tehniques, but I had two to present myself.
My first idea is having a red amp lead being plugged into a guitar jack, the camera follows the cable and sees that it spells out the words 'Red Room'. I'm still not sure which way to go with it, Derek and Andy both preferred this one to my other idea, and said that I should use live-action or make it really stylised. I really like the idea of using Flash for it, but I think some of the camera movements in my idea might be too hard to try and recreate. (The only way I can really think of getting the angles I want are to use Pixilation or After Effects, which my skills are worse than Maya on. Which is saying something.)
My second idea compromises of a red box (original...) being opened and lots of musical equipment jumping into it. The box lid shuts and then shakes, then re-opens displaying the words 'Red Room' inside. Not as original, but I quite liked this idea and was tempted into using Stopmotion to animate the box, however I've decided to stick with my original idea with the guitar.
I've been a busy little bee in the evenings and have managed to nearly complete our storyboard project, even though it's not due in for the 12th of March. I thought I'd get it out of the way so that I can focus on my Flash and 3D, which I know will take me a lot longer and be considerably harder because of my lack of skills. (Having said that though, I've just completed the second character's lip-sync, so I don't think I'm doing too badly, if you want to watch it, you can see it at my YouTube account, here. 3D, well I suck so bad, so let's not go there....)
We had to choose from 3 scripts to turn one into a storyboard, and so, (despite having never seen the TV program, or being any good at drawing cars...) I chose to do the 'Knightrider' script. Derek said that it would be a good idea to familiarise ourselves with the script before attempting to storyboard, so I printed out the script and then drew all over the top of it as the ideas came to when reading through.
(They're probably massive previews, because my scanner likes to make things ludicrously big in its bid to kill those with a slow internet connection, so click on them for a full preview... if you dare!)
I realise now, after reading the brief again, that I need to go over my drawings in pen or something, though I'm quite tempted to leave them as they are, because I think pen might ruin them a bit. I love the blue animation pencil too much. But, here is the finished(ish) storyboards (edited so they should be a reasonable preview size... I hope):
Just a bit of an update, having been working on some of the background animation and have just completed the lip-sync for 'Kitty', so I thought I would post what i've done.
I originally started with about 10 mouths, but realised I needed more. I ended up with 16 mouths in total. I saved each under "mouth_" and then the corresponding sounds the mouth shape made, like so:
I've been working on the Flash project since I got back this afternoon, I haven't tried to do the lip-sync yet and have been struggling (and losing...) to the Classic Motion Guide, which is why my tests and what i've got so far are a bit jerky, but I quite like it like this but I think I will ask Andy when he gets back, or Dan, the King of Flash for help.
I've concentrated on getting the characters eyes, and I'm quite glad I decided to do this first, the eyes can help enhance the character and I think, with what I've got so far, that it's worked quite successfully with the dialogue.
I think my favourite bit is when the interviewer makes a comment and her eyes aren't really focused on them until she needs to answer.
I spent the majority of yesterday preparing for my Flash project, we have to take a 30-45 second sound clip from an interview with four students about various academic topics. I ended up choosing a segment where "Kitty" talks about her overuse of post-it notes for essay planning. I instantly had ideas spring into my head when I heard it, so decided that this would be the clip of audio for me.
I ended up kind of storyboarding (in a sense)and creating character design as I went along, and ended up with 4 pages of planning, as can be seen below (click for larger versions, which really are MASSIVE, and they've been edited so they're only 50% of the original size, my scanner ios trying to kill all with a slow internet connection!):
I then spent the rest of the afternoon/evening planning the symbols and layers I'd need. As my Flash skills are still considerably novice, I also decided I would try out a few of my ideas before I jumped straight into the final thing (which I would've started properly now instead of updating my blog, except it didn't want to import my soundclip. EVEN THOUGH it plays fine in Windows Media Player. *facepalm*).
Ah, what a hellish week last week was. Certainly the busiest on the course so far! I had both the background project and my essay to finish. Thankfully I managed to both, though I will admit I was feeling pretty damn stressed about the whole thing, you know you need to take a break from essay writing when you can't even form coherent sentences anymore!
So, here are my 3 finished backgrounds: 1. Exterior Sea background (click for full view please):
2. Interior (this was the last one I completed, and I would've given it more detail, added things on top of the tables etc, but didn't have time with the essay as well!): I'm particularly pleased with how the lighting worked out and how the light looks yellow-y on the bed :)
3. My favourite, another exterior (it's a bit shadowy on the bottom left hand corner because of how it scanned in, I had to do it in two parts and join them together in photoshop):
As I'd finished my essay & background project according to schedule, I had all of monday off to myself so decided I'd mess around in Flash, I tried to do a lip-sync to a voiceclip I'd found on my computer, but for some reason Flash didn't really want to play ball and let me create a "classic motion guide" layer, I'm not really sure what that was about, but it kind of scuppered my plans. However, I decided I'd give it a go for practisng the old faithfull walk cycle, and I think it came out pretty well, no real signs of a limp, which is pretty good considering it didn't take too long or had too much effort behind it.
I'm thinking that I might upload my Essay, because it seems to be the growing trend among the other first-years. Hmm. Wether or not anyone would read it is another matter. I also went to go and see "The Princess and The Frog" today with Olly and one of my flatmates, in all honesty, it's a good watch, as long as you don't mind a large number of songs. The animation itself is pretty shit hot, the bit that stood out for me most was a scene with hundreds of fireflies slighting up the whole swamp. It must've been done using particle effects. It was pretty damn awesome.
I've just got back from my Stop Motion workshop with Ann. I worked with Rozi and Hugh.
It was really good fun and we got to do two animations, the first was under Ann's instruction, we had to make our Puppets touch their toes:
(I animated the puppet on the right, Hugh the middle and Rozi the left).
As we had 45 minutes of the session left, Ann wanted us to come up with our own idea to animate. We chose to have the puppets scratch themselves (it makes you itchy to look at, but hopefully will make you chuckle as well):
It was good fun, even though the puppets creeped me out a little to begin with!
