one week of progress...

I have roughly finished the animation for my industry exercises project today. However, there are still a lot of things that can be improved and upon watching it through I came up with a list that will help me…

Things that need improving;
· Tried to get better quality movie, flash may be lowering the quality!
· Add sound
· First part is fine, detailed enough
· Just more detailed needed on in-betweens during walk cycles.
· Size of character changes at end, he needs to be smaller.
· More animation on parts when he is standing still – for example he could do something with his arms or scratch his face.
· Very badly animated when he falls over their feet! Redo!
· Ending is fine as well.



I also plan to show this to Steve Crocker on Wednesday’s lesson and get his feedback on parts I can improve, as well as by asking my friends. I’m not sure how much I will be able to do in the time frame left but I want to try and make it look at least a little more professional! I feel more willing to do so now that the pressure is slightly off.

Also, last week Alex Hulse, another tutor, had a glance over at my work and gave me some good suggestions to counter the problem of the ‘jumpiness’ of the camera. If I import the scene into After Effects, I can use ‘tracking’ to hold it still (even though this will crop some of the footage out and means I will need to put black bars and the top and bottom of my animation.

Unfortunately, since I have already finished my animation and tried to compensate for the camera’s ‘jumpiness’ by manually moving the character in time and rubbing out the parts of his body that I needed to, it would be needless time and effort to enforce this in the final project when I have spent so many hours on it already and I would rather use the time to improve the actual animation itself than the quality of the camera.

Here is the test we did though, to show what I’ve learned.



If you compare this to the original footage it is much smoother… The green cube should be able to show that.

Start of Animating and Formative

Had my formative on Wednesday last week with Steve, but it seems as though everything is going alright at the moment. I think he was a bit concerned with the amount of work I've set myself and whether I can complete it in time, but I plan to work like a crazy person over this week and get my animation done!!!

Okay, so yes, I have now started animating this scene. I have run into a few bumps along the way but am progressing as well as I can.

Here are a few clips of what I have done so far...;



Just very simple animation of him painting..



And one where he walks behind Gene and Donald. The reason he moves around so much in this one is because I adjusted where he was standing to fit the camera movements of the film, unfortunately that file is too big for blogspot to support so I had to delete the film from the background.

---
::Thoughts::

We are much further into the project than I thought we were, there are roughly 2/3 weeks remaining to work on this and after consideration have decided to go back to using Flash, as I'm finding it difficult and am wasting a lot of time trying to get ToonBoom.

I also am disappointed in myself for the quality of animation so far, as I have already said, I plan to go back after it's completed and add more detail in, but if I don't do that this project will not be up to my usual standard and I feel as though I might deem it a failure...

I feel as though I haven't really achieved anything new due to time constraints, only practised getting better at flash. It's interesting timing my character with real life ones but I don't feel as though this is as big a step forwards as I wanted it to be.

character design

I'm a tiny bit behind with my schedule, but I have been toying with the character design in my head for the last week or so, constantly changing my opinion, and have decided to change him slightly so that he's not such an old man.
Now I want to animate him as a middle-aged, short, fat guy! This will be more challenging and I won't feel as bad for him getting beaten up :D

I have also found a useful walk cycle on youtube of someone with his figure which I can adapt for my animation;



Anyway, I quickly drew him onto photoshop and started playing around with the colours..





it is important that I keep his design simple because this time I want to add shading to his animation, something I didn't have time for last time.
I think I am going to go with the design of the first picture, because it reflects the outfits of Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor, and because it just looks better :P

My next step is to work out the storyboard completely and to start drawing the key poses, I want to get into this as soon as I can.

I have also finished working out the storyboard. Here is a VERY basic animatic of what I want to do, took about 10mins, sorry for rubbish quality;


Before I finish this project, I need to try and get a better quality version of the clip, with sound. But since this was ripped directly from the DVD and not from the internet I'm not sure if there is anything I can do. Will have to enquire about it at college over the next few days.