Heavy Weight Lifting... Finished *EDITED*

Final animation, I'm tempted to add a bit of a walk cycle ot the beginning, but I just tried to start and it is mind-bending trying to do a walk cycle backwards and trying to do it so that it matches up is nigh on impossible. Especially when I'm struggling to keep the height of my character the same already. But I don't feel bad, the assignment was to do a character lifting a heavy object, not a walk cycle, so that's what I've created. I used my reference material to help animate the 'fall' and my rough drawings/storyboard for the rest.



After seeing a few other people's videos I had a bit of a panic because my character didn't have a face, so I added one, it's funny how much 4 lines add a bit of personality:

Experimental Research

For one of our projects this term we have to create an experimental animation (without the aid of a computer) to some music. As Derek hasn't put up or played any of the music options I haven't really had any ideas for animating yet. So I sifted through YouTube and backwards through my blog and came across a few favourites and some new interesting ones that you may be interested in too...

My Green Crocodile (I came across it in Foundation and I simply love it, I'm sure I've shared it on my blog before, but it's realy worth a watch).


Loof & Let Dime (from Bradford Animation Festival last year, I think it'd be harder to try and replicate something like this without the aid of a computer, but ink and cutout may produce similar results).


Photograph of Jesus (another Bradford find, but could be fun using photographs from real-life in real-life!).


My Paper Mind (a video that Hugh Herbert liked on YouTube that led me to spend time surfing through random animations).


YouTube user nosnoma's "paper horse animation test".


YouTube user mattpee's "Alice in Wonderland".

Diary

I collected my copy of the diary I did the cover for over the summer.

It actually looks pretty good...



...Except for where they put my name...

...bit of a design fail there.

Heavy Weight Lifting...

Nope, I'm not going to be a weightlifter, the title refers to our first assignment.



We have to create an animation of a character lifting up a heavy object. I'm going to use Flash and have created a rough version already:



And thanks to the child who kicked their football into our garden over the ridiculously high fence, I was able to record some horrendous reference material (with my terrible, terrible acting):



(Of course, my character isn't quite as lanky and doesn't have hair to tuck behind its ears).

Second Year Madness...

So I start back this week, as a scary second year *gasp*, we had our introduction session yesterday and have ADVANCED MAYA SKILLS tonight.

That probably would have terrified me a year ago, but this year, I'm actually quite looking forward to it. It's optional, but I plan to go to as many as I can before my mind becomes over-saturated with polygonal crazies.

I'm also going to attempt to model this:

It's my Dad's 1970 Karmann Ghia (called Audrey). I must be a masochist. Hopefully I'll have modelled it by his birthday (July 10th... giving me a pretty lengthy ammount of time, and most likely sanity, to try and achieve it).

I'm putting my "Summer" animation on the back burner for now, I really would like to finish it, but my Uni work is going to come first (plus I've temporarily run out of ideas... hopefully christmas will bring some more inspiration for it).

Summer finished previews...

As I don't own a copy of After Effects myself, I was cheeky and nabbed my boyfriend's computer for a bit when I went to visit him to convert some of the finished frames into some clips finished animation. So, this is what the finished article will look like, the pet one is still a work in progress...




They're only 720p because I had to use Windows Movie Maker to mash the clips together and add some black bits (so Youtube doesn't hack off the endings/beginnings like it normally does...).

It was horrible.

With Flash comes the Crash...

So the multiple crashes start again.

Serves me right though, it was getting to be a pretty big file and I only had one copy (rookie error for an animation student I know, especially when working with the reliably unreliable Flash).

Tis fixed now, my scenes are now saved as separate files and I think I worked out that a symbol in one of the scenes was causing all the problems. Plus that scene had lots of tweens in, so Flash wasn't a particularly happy bunny, (ironically it's the scene in which my pet rabbits are, aharhar).

But it seems to be back on track! (Famous last words...) But at least since my RAM upgrade & shiny new external hardrive, my computer is being super quick at loading it up again, unlike the days of Formation, where it would take about 10 minutes to start up.

Hopefully I won't get a tally going again...