I've been a busy bee, or should i say, FLY?

Lots of pretty videos to watch... Posted in chronological order (well, the bits of the animation I've been working on anyway). Pretty excited to get it wrapped up soon. Should be looking good :) I've just got one more scene left to do, which I can hopefully complete by tomorrow, then we'll be off to export them with an alpha channel and have a play around in After Effects. EEP.
With the last video, I wanted there to be flying flies (confused yet?) like the ones in the second video, along with the black dotty ones, but as you can guess: Flash crashed. Epically. And it rendered out crazily jerky. So the freeze/crash count stands at an impressive 16 times. (10 from just one morning, what an efficent service).






Oh, and for some reason, because YouTube likes to mess with me, the quality is crazily bad, which makes no sense because when it's on my computer, or on Facebook video it works fine. Stoooopid.

Freeze/Crash Count... 4

I finished the fly symbol last night, I wasn't happy with the legs I'd drawn on the other one, they looked a bit stiff considering they'd be blowing about in the wind as it flew. He has the anatomically correct six legs now! Each leg is on a separate layer and each individual leg is made up of nine different frames that loop with the wings.

I'm currently working on the lab escape scenes, I've completed the backgrounds, click for a larger preview...
The Inner Lab:

aaaand, the World outside the Lab:


I'm now off to animate the fly in these scenes :)

Freeze Count...

Stands at 3.

Not bad, considering I started animating today. Why do scanners make images so huge? We're working to 1920 x 1080 and that's pretty huge in itself, but the scans are double that. Maybe more. Crazy.

Planning... because it's better to plan a little bit late than not at all.

Being the neurotic I am, and in preparation for the Formation project, I sat down this morning with the help of (a not very enthused) Jake to work out the exact length for every part of the Animation. Besides my neurosis about needing to know exactly how long everything is, I have some good reasons for doing so...
...Flash is notorious for crashing (Jake suggested we keep a tally going which sounds like a good idea: it currently stands at 1), so hopefully by making the animation in separate files will ease the strain, and also make it easier to edit any mistakes... We can each work on our bits of the project separately (from the comfort of our own homes!) knowing that when we come to edit the animation together, it'll (hopefully) be the correct length and bits won't overrun. It's also been easier to share the workload, so that we all have an even ammount of things to be getting on with.

We decided that we're going to edit the final scenes together using After Effects, this is partly because it'll be easier than doing so in Flash, but also because we want to add a paper texture to the background. As the animation's stlye is paper cut-out (and most of the symbols literally are scanned in pieces of coloured paper...), a plain white background would be boring and plain lazy on our part. Flash hates having the paper texture in the background (we're having to produce the animation at 1920 x 1080, so it's pretty large), but having it move makes it crash (hence the total standing at 1 from when we tried this morning...), but AE seems to like it, and if we export all of the scenes from Flash with an Aplha Channel (as we accidently did with an old version of the Animatic which we had a test play with... see below...) then it'll (metaphorically speaking) be a piece of cake. Hopefully.



Annnd I forgot to post this, an update of the (as yet still unfinished) fly symbol, now with FOUR legs:

(P.S. Congratulations to my tutor Andy who's just had a baby boy!)

[Experi]mental Sketchbook [2]

An update from last week's sketchbook, I've done some more Animal Firm things this week but don't have the files with me at the moment, so you'll have to wait patiently for another blog update...

Lasat week's sketchy game (working with Jake) was to draw song titles... I really enjoyed it and filled a small sketchbook with just over 30 drawings... not bad, and it saved me from five hours of train travel boredom last weekend. Anyway, here are 8 of my favourites :)

clickee clickee for a massive preview...

Formation Animatic

The completed Animatic for the Formation project:


We're updating the formation blog pretty often, not everything is going to post everything here, so you might want to check it out.

It's a good thing the Animatic is completed, as in two hours time I'll be heading home to celebrate my (not-so) little brother's 18th birthday. (Don't worry, I'm taking my sketchbooks to hopefully abate my boredom on the trains...) Will be back ready on sunday to start the real animation on monday :)

Sketchbooking

This week I've gotten on a lot better with Kathy's project (largely due to Nigel & Olly coming up with a good idea to base this weeks drawing around). I've worked on it all over the weekend (also been working on some Animal Firm) so that I can spend this week cracking on with the Animatic I've just started for the "Formation" project, which we now have a blog for.

Anyway, sketchbook project this week, we drew an object beginning with the first letters of the alphabet.