06 December, 2009

11 Second- December

Okaay, this was one lengthy project... firstly it was choosing the right audio file. I wanted something which was interesting and yet not hard. Okay, so maybe hard isn't the right word as I don't mind a challenge.

I listened to all the audio files and there was something which intrigued me about the December one. I could already picture the scene/scenario from just listening to it... something which failed to occur with the other voice clips.

Once I did this I went on to watch old disney movies. As this part of the course looks at 2D design I went for the old disney movies and examined how they did the angles and lip sync.

The images can be seen here


Mid shot- Two characters portrayed with upper 1/2 of the body
Close up- Less than 1/2 the body is shown in the image
Long Shot- Perspective shot of the whole character + surroundings.
Long Shot- Perspective shot of the whole character + surroundings.

After getting some reference, I needed to check out how to lip sync correctly- therefore, I went searching for ways to lip sync. Here is what I found

After doing this, I began to do some character design sketches. (These will be uploaded some other time).

We were shown an animatic from an Animator called Jeff Gabor and I was inspired by how he acted and portrayed this is his animation.
I attempted to do something like this and my animatic can be seen here



Once I had done this I began to do some tests, to find out which would be the method to approach this animatic in my Animation.

My earlier tests can be seen here

What went wrong here was the fact that I forgot about the 180 degree rule. This meant I put both of my characters merged into one which is VERY problematic. Also, the scaling was wrong so I couldn't really work with lip syncing. I had issues as an example of this I did have... instead of saying the word have I animated H-A-V-E. Obviously the lips move differently when pronouncing the words than saying the individual letters.

Following this I decided to increase the scale of my illustrations and began to continue with more tests
At least this short clip works better as I remembered about the rule, but it still needs much work and the scaling is still bothering me.



I am pleased with the leaning action in this clip. The reason for this was teachers tend to peep over the student and look at what they are doing. The reference for the bending can be seen above in my animatic.
I wanted to test out what it would do in the second where there is no audio, so I decided my character would be writing on a paper. I wanted to make it look like she was struggling and hence the facial expression. :)

This one is working better but still has glitches. I am pleased with the zoom effect- I was slightly worried about how it would look but it's okay.



This one didn't work well, the lip sync went out in places and wasn't very clear or good. I have to keep working on it.
For the pointing finger I used myself as reference
See below



And finally, I am pleased to present my final animation.

Enjoy it :)


23 November, 2009

First Animation



For this very first project I was set to work in a group. This consisted of Joe, Gareth, Chrissi, Greg and myself. It was a continuation of each others work- my animation followed Chrissi's which is why it has legs and a face. After my animation followed Gareth- the way it was set out was my last page would become his first page, from then on it would become a cycle.

This was the very first animation that I had done. Apart from the hair that keeps growing... (I think it was having some hair vitamins) it's not too bad. I really tried to focus on the bending action, as the character leans to pick the bomb up. I did plenty of sketches and asked for my friends to 'act' the motion out for me. I found this useful to get an idea of the motion of the body as I kept watching it repeated. When I began to do the animation I realized that it all just fit together and started to work.

Below you can find some sketches for the character design



Above you can see how much trouble i had to get the body to actually lean correctly. Some of the poses are very unreal and awkward. Thankfully when it came down to doing the Animation it all worked :).

Below is my final Animation (>v<)/''. Enjoy