Friends are like umbrellas 12

Fixed up the colors that was supposed to go on the interior of the castle. Looking back at the old thing now I am kind of glad I never got to finish it the first time around. Someone should seriously have stopped me from using the colors I picked out back then. I know I was thinking of making the purple contrast against the orange, but I have still no idea why on earth I picked the green. It looks like I tried to make seaweed stew or something. Next time I do something like that I'd like someone to stop me.

Friends Are Like Umbrellas 11

Ahahahaha....Haven't touched this film since June. Might be a good thing. After all, now that time have passed and I have all the time in the world I realized that one section I didn't have time to have fun with is all mine to play around with as I please.

Next section to animate is the castle scene, and now that I had a second look....I don't like the old costumes so I redid them. Background colors will be the next on my overhaul list for this section. (aka. what was I thinking and why did no one stop me.)

And on another note:
It looks like if I want any music done for this I will have to get my own piano and magically become the master of sound. Or I will just wait until the film is over and done with completely before bothering with any kind of music at all.

Friends are like umbrellas 10

Round number brings on a long overdue rant and overall negative complaints....

I am really not sure if it is me not being clear, but I keep finding that I have to tell the people doing the cleanup that the lines are in fact, not black, they are dark grey. And the line color for the cheeks are the red one underneath the black one found underneath the label "lines".

I am amazed how everyone tends to ignore my reference sheets. I have gotten to the point where there is only one other team member besides me that I allow to do rough animation because I have enough to do keeping track of the people doing cleanup and color, I don't need the added work of telling people that they need to have the character being a consistent size, Lia's jacket is very long so you can't really see her legs much and other obvious things you can find out by looking at the reference sheet.

I did take the time to make a little tutorial on how to make tv paint for the people that are working with me so that they can go through the basic things if they forget what I told them the first time. It was only for the cleanup, but since the coloring works the same for the most part except the tools used, I figured I could just re-direct people to it. I might have to do a color one next since that is what I will have for people to do next.

The project seem to be lagging a bit behind on the production part.
Both because the main chunk of my team members are swamped with work as they are in the year below me, and because I spent the easter holidays being fed up with the project to the point that if someone mentioned it I would simply try not to talk about it. It's ridiculous that I'd have to spend so long to re-charge my drive, but then again it is not surprising considering I am not a fan of doing more than one job at a time - and in this production I have done every single role there is except playing instruments and finding the sound effects.

Wand

Just having some fun with a voice clip from my friend I found on my computer. I don't know if I should aim this to get finished at any point or whatnot - at least not with my major project going on. Though it would be fun though if I could have a little part of it done.

Not sure if I should bother with a pattern on the guy. It looks okey when he's just standing around but I'm not really wanting to animate patterns, and I can't stand cheating by having the pattern on a layer which is static under the animation. Also it might be needed at all in an animation where he's moving around anyway. He just looked a bit boring all flat colored.

Friends are like umbrellas 9

A long overdue teaser clip from the animation. Still a couple of things that needs to be done, the background was too saturated when put together with the animation, I will be dealing with that later on when I am not doing all the keyframes on everything else. I think this will be the last teaser that is put out in public before the film is done. Wouldn't want to spoil it all - though the entire animatic is available it's not the same as seeing the finished thing.

In other news I have gotten in touch with a music student who is doing a track for this film, he's already come up with some nice stuff. Admittedly it's really hard for me to let go of the track I have - but really, I don't have permission to use it and it is going to quickly for the animation so I have to do that.

Friends are like Umbrellas 8

Revisited the animatic as I got some feedback saying that some parts were a bit off.

Another tutor made me change the colors so that they all went along with one another, as well as making new costumes for the castle scene so it would look more like a party. I didn't want to confuse people by changing the outfits around too much, so I decided to not change the colors and overall shapes of them, also unfortunate as it is I do not have the luxury of spending a long time on doing pre production and play with things in a grand fashion unless I plan to kill off my animators during this production. I know they could be capable of animating something more complicated but we simply do not have the time to play as much as I'd like.

I managed to re color all the sheets I previously had as well as making a new one that is for the marry go round horses because I realized that I didn't have one.

Friends are like umbreallas 6

I did a map over the main sequence so that I could put down the rules of the white space, and show the journey in one go. To me it was really clear what was going on, but I didn't know if it would work for everyone else, so I asked two people; one that is fully into the project and another that knows about it, but isn't really in the process. It made perfect sense to the person that was on the project, but the other person pointed out a few things that confused them - which I added in so that if I hand it to a brand new new crew member I don't have to explain everything A-B-C style. It was always meant to go together with the animatic and storyboards, but it was nice to get feedback from someone that didn't remember either so I could get what would be confusing to someone new as the map was bluntly obvious to me, and my team mate understood it just fine.

I got told that since my backgrounds are mainly white I don't have to do actual layouts for it, because really, what are you going to do about a white background than just hand someone a white paper?
I found that instead I have to treat the scenes as props, design them first then place them how I need them.

I started out with the merry-go-round since its the first object we get to see.
My tutor mentioned that amusement parks are more exciting at night, so I thought I'd add some more purple into the design so it hints more to a night scene and the lights on the merry go round stands out a little more. I will have a chat with my background artist about what to do with the colors.

Open Happiness II

The finished animation of Open Happiness.

I didn't really change anything on it, I found that making the map flat or oval shaped simply ended up confusing and looking pretty bad so I went with the round planet instead. There is an instance or two I would have liked the animation to be smoother - it seems a bit quick, but I only had 20 seconds to play with. The end was supposed to be animated, not still shots of them jumping all into a pile, but I simply didn't have the time to animate and color it all if I were to hand it in on time.

Either way I had fun doing this. Even though I worked alone on it I had a lot more fun than my initial project simply because I was making it not only for myself, but for my friends as well. It is a whole different feeling working on something when the people around you are positive to what you do.

Open Happiness I

I'm on it again.
Attacking animation with photoshop.
Think I'll end up making the globe into a flatter oval-ish map instead, the way it looks is bugging me....

Anyways, was told to do "a personal animation" something "that represented me".

I didn't really know what to do in the beginning, but after an unhealthy amount of hours listening to Monkey Majik songs I found that I'd do one of their songs in a style based on anime openings/endings. I went with the English version of their song "open happiness" not only because my teachers would have no idea what the text is in Japanese and I don't want to subtitle it, the English version, although sounding the same actually have a different text from the Japanese version which fit better with what I was doing.

If anyone argues at any point this animation is not personal just because I say it's based on anime and I picked a song by one of my favourite bands...they simply don't know me well enough to find the personal meaning in it. ù_ú (and I have no intention of explaining it to you if that is the case.)

ChickenFox

My blog has decided to hate my youtube today so I just have to link them instead.


ChickenFox_9A
This scene was a bit tricky for me as I had to do a run cycle with a basket, but without the basket since the prop wasn't finished. The director didn't like it too much the first time around, so I had to animate a run cycle on the spot and paste it back into the animation.
The bear wasn't difficult at all, and was given the green light the first time around.

ChickenFox_5C_wip
This scene was something I started, but didn't quite finish, so it mainly consist of keyframes, especially the tail since I like to do the individual movement on that later once I get the run cycle right.


Both of the backgrounds are the stand in version from the animatic as the finished version was not done when I was working on the scenes.

Chickenfox_test2

Something longer and better than last time. Still getting the hang of him, but it's easier than last time now that I understand a bit better how to move the parts about without breaking him. Also I know that the playback doesn't play realtime, so I rely a bit more on the dope sheet than anything else by now.

Chicken Fox_test stage

Doing some tests with Cel Action for a third year film I'm going to be animating for. It's just a quick thing to getting the hang of working the program and understanding the way the characters are set up.

It's a bit difficult dealing with a program that doesn't seem to let you view the video in real time and I have trouble figuring how to get frames duplicated over so that things go on a loop.   (；¬д¬)

Funny In 15

The final animation for the funny in 15.

Funny in 15

Anematic for team project called "funny in 15" where we are to make a funny video lasting for 15 seconds.

don't like him either

Decided to have another go on playing with lip sync. I don't know if I will try to polish this up or not, nonetheless it was fun to play with it again.

Animated with photoshop CS6. I like it, it actually have a timeline and you can add sound on it now.

Lanto and Ciara

He's supposed to say "Mmmhh, It would be nice to come over...".

A little something I did based on a picture I made for Kerri a long time ago. Figured it would be simple enough to try out while figuring out how to work the photoshop animation feature. I must say, I like it most of the time.
I can draw with my beloved opacity and now that I figured the frames are exactly the same as the layers it's really easy to do it. The only thing I miss is a proper timeline for the times I want something longer or shorter than the set times you can pick from - but I don't see why I can't learn how to work my way around them.

I actually find it more fun and interesting to animate like this. I can draw on the computer, but it's still pretty close to a traditional way of doing things with the whole "must learn timing properly on your own". I now think I appreciate dope sheets a bit more. They didn't make any sense when all I had to do was to copy-paste and tweak here and there - everything worked itself out smoothly, I didn't really need it. Now I appreciate having a paper telling me what comes when. I will probably have some more fun with this and see exactly what I can get done with it.

Animation tests; Photoshop

Have been doing some small scribbles in Photoshop just for fun. I like animating in Photoshop of some reason, probably because it let's me have opacity (whoever makes flash - would you please include that in the brush options so I can see what I'm drawing? D= ). I like doodling sketchy stuff and the opacity lets me do just that. <3

Top one had a nice windy day blowing the hair...until I changed my mind. (was gonna do Hare Hare Yukai, but I just didn't feel like it after the first 3 frames.)
Bottom one looks kinda like I coughed up a rainbow, but that's because the keyframes were done in different colors and I followed up by doing the frames in between in the same colors...and never bothered to change it.

Walk with cane

Walk cycle for class.
Think the head is to bouncy for this one, should be more on level - like floating along kinda thing.
Yes I know there is no opposite arm swinging and the arm that you do see is rather kept close to the body (maybe a bit stiff) and is swinging at the same time as the leg on the same side.
That's because when I did the walk, like I was told to do, that is what actually happens. I keep kicking my umbrella along with my leg, and stuffing my hand in my pocket.

Walks were surprisingly fun to do, but next time I use myself for reference I'll use a camera that doesn't blur out 80% of the movement.

Cubey Animation

The task this week was drawing a cube person reacting to an object appearing next to it.

I chose to go with the ever classic falling flowerpot. Though...I'd love to have used a big piano, but that would have been a bit too time consuming for me at this point.

Joined animtion; Facebook

My part of the school project, joined animation.

My theme for it was Facebook.

Unfortunately I managed to shoot on single frames instead of doubles, so it goes a little too quick.

Should probably upload the storyboard thing I got too, but my web cam don't like light stickman sketches.

Will have to wait until I occupy the school scanner.