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!
I've spent most of this weekend planning my essay and trying to get as much as possible finished for the background project. So far i've completed both my exterior locations:
An Underwater scene: (you can click on the image to get a larger preview of it!)
and a Graveyard:
Aaaaand, this is my interior (I used the Sims2 to make a model room to base it on!): I think the graveyard is my favourite, I wanted to colour that one in, but our brief said that we had to colour the interior and leave one exterior in pencil. If I had more time and didn't have to write the essay (the deadline for both is on the same day, hence why I got this out of the way now...), I would've coloured it, who knows, I may come back to it later on.
And in case you're interested I uploaded some of my notebook scribbles (not related to the course) on my DeviantArt here.
Just a quick play around after installing Flash successfully! :D
I wasn't really sure what to do, but I found it quite amusing to turn the hand to a spider-type-thing.
It's a funny size because I originally set the document space to widescreen (like Andy suggested in our tutorial) but as I only really drew on the left hand side I thought i'd clip it so there wasn't a load of blank white space.
This new term is already turning out to be pretty sic. We've got some crazy new projects (including working with Broadcasting students to produce graphics for their TV show [i'm scared shitless about that one], an Animation Background project and in the future we're being set Modelling projects in Maya and Flash projects.); new Software (After Effects [which after the first session doesn't seem as horribly scary as I thought, except it kept crashing...] and Flash [which I'm pretty stoked about]); and learning to do new things like Modelling on Maya. It's going to be awesome.
I spent most of yesterday afternoon installing upgrades for my computer in order to install Flash, which took forever. While I was doing that, I handwrote out this blog update to type up and began work on my new sketchbook/background project for Kathy (and cleaned my bathroom, on a saturday night, how unbeliavbly wild University life is). But today i've successfully managed to install it, so I'll most likely be spending my free time practising getting to grips with it. (Unlike Maya & AE, Flash looks a lot more easy to use, and it's small enough that my computer can handle it... hopefully.) I've wanted to learn Flash for a long time, but had never managed to get my hands on a copy or be taught any of the controls before now. I hope that now I've got my own copy, uit means I'll be able to do some animation of my own when I get home. At Christmas I only had Animation paper, and a combination of being ill, working nearly everyday and having a distinct lack of ideas and Rostrum Camera meant I did nada on the work front. I also like the idea of Flash being Vector based and related to Photoshop, (I think this is perhaps why I feel a little more confident in learning it), it'll also give me a chance to improve my graphics tablet skills.
I'm looking forward to the background project alot more than the animal-head one (sorry Kathy). The backgrounds have to be the weirdest sizes I've come across, it's a size called 12 Field (which, incase you're wondering the exact measurements, which you're probably not, are 267 x 330mm), which is a little annoying because it's slightly larger than A4 (a nice comfortable size), and means i've had to crack out my mahoosive A2 sketchbook in order to work at the correct size. I'm glad though, because you can't work on A4 forever and the larger size means I can add more detail within the drawings.
I'm already feeling a bit more confident with Maya (which is a relief, although i'm still terrfied of going anywhere near the graph editor), our first CGI environments tutorial/session with Georg was on tuesday and I was very pleased because I actually understood it all. It'll still be a long time before I'll be able to create anything decent on it, if I thought my computer could handle it, I'd install Maya on it to practice,though it may buckle under the weight of Flash, we shall see....
