Pull it apart just to see how it fits together...

I've been looking at the work of some skilled Flash artists lately like Adam Phillips to try and get an idea of how I'm going to approach my final animation without resorting to selling what little of my soul I have left to the Demon Gods of Tweening.

And then I found this by Sabrina Cotugno.

Pretty sweet. I like the style of lineless animation and the colour coherency overall, but I also love the way this just doesn't look like your average Flash animation. So I sat down tonight to analyse it and figure out what she did to get it the way it looks.

And this is what I came up with:
1. 99% of character animation shot on 3s. Some on 2s. Almost none on 1s. If I was to apply this to my 30 second film, even if I animated every 3rd frame (which I'm not - I'll be hand-animating a lot less than that) I'd still only have 250 frames to draw. Sounds manageable.
2. Said characters look mostly redrawn for major actions, but are probably compiled into symbol libraries on every redraw, because there's also a lot of symbol re-use, but not in horribly obvious ways. A bit of a slight movement here and there but nothing major like the kinds of things you see on the ABC in the afternoons.
3. Lineless shapes ftw. Makes the tiny shape tweens she has on things like hair-bits bouncing and stuff look much less crap and more like real shapes in animation.
4. All the backgrounds look like they're PS layers turned into bitmap symbols. I'd say she used alpha tweens on the layers to get the fade-in glow at the beginning on the trees and leaves and so on.
5. Backgrounds and effects are done on 1s, but she's avoided problems with sliding by putting foreground objects in the way of the feet when they're walking along the ground plane, so it just gives the effect of a slight shift on the camera angle as it pans with the movement.
6. Obviously she's made animation her bitch and so the lines of action are still all perfect and everything's on-model with the redraws and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if she did pencil tests for all the major character animation before redrawing over it in Flash.

Even if I use none of the above techniques in my film for this semester, it's something to think about for third year anyway. You can probably do all the same stuff in Toon Boom as well.

Flash animatic

Last assignment was to do a Flash animatic, with all the god-awful pain that comes with tweening and nesting of symbols. I managed it in the end, but I'd rather have teeth pulled than have to deal with that kind of tediousness in a three-week project again. Sure, whatever, redraw the frames the traditional way in the program, just don't ask me to even begin to think about Flash's jerky background-motion functions.

Here's the fruits of the labour.






And here's the final animatic.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm now going to go gouge my eyes out with a spoon.

Experimental Animation Done Right

Awesome.

Stop Motion Animation

After god-only knows how long, it's finished. Or at least, finished enough for me to post it.

Sorry about the quality. I had to compress the mother out of it before it was small enough to upload.


Made with: beads, doublesided tape, cardboard, chalk pastels, craft glue, some clear plastic sleeves ripped out of a display folder, hairspray a Pentax K-100, $10 no-name tripod, my dining room table, and Adobe Premiere on the computers at school for all editing and post-processing.

Enjoy,

Still working on it...

The exciting life of an animation student.

We're like rockstars, I swear.

For the record, the white thing in front of the table is my light-reflector since I'm using natural light coming through the window behind me to shoot. It's just a piece of A3 paper folded and resting on top of some of my books, with a Terry Pratchett paperback making sure it doesn't blow away. The camera's not connected to any kind of laptop with stop-mo software, but I can pull up the images on the viewscreen on the top, though, and I regularly do movement checks to make sure my line of action is flowing smoothly and I haven't bumped the camera too much (though there have been some stuff-ups). I can't go back and fix serious problems so it's all pretty tedious moving the model on the background shot to shot, because I have to try and get the movement right each time.

I'm shooting on twos and trying to do it all with natural light (though I have the light on in this photo so you can see what I'm doing), but classes keep getting in the way and I may end up doing some final shoots with artificial lighting, which is annoying because the white balance on my camera gives everything a yellow tinge when I have tried this in the past. Oh well, that's what post-processing is for, I suppose.

This post brought to you by the letters C-O-F & E, and Dominos Online Pizza Ordering. Oh yeah.

Pixels

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. - Arts and animation videos.

Documentary Fundraising

There's a really cool documentary in the process of being made about the Cartoon College in Vermont. They're looking for funds to finish the film, so go to the site and donate if you want.

Here's the trailer.

BRAND NEW teaser

CARTOON COLLEGE — The Movie | MySpace Video

Experimental Animation: v2.3 - Test Animation Success!

Kind of proud of this...


Awwww yeah.

Experimental Animation: v2.2

This is my home-made rostrum setup on my dining table.

Awesome, eh? I can't show you the camera setup but that little wire-thing coming in from the left is a DSLR remote I use to take the photos so I don't bump the camera. Unfortunately it drains the battery like nobody's business and I had to stop shooting tonight because I ran out of power completely. I keep my laptop open with the animatic at the appropriate spot in Toon Boom so I get an idea of what kind of movement I should be making under the camera. The camera itself is just precariously perched on a tripod which I have manipulated around so the camera sits parrallel with the table when shooting.

Anyway, here, have some light tests...

Lamp too close on the right.

Done with my awesome vintage blue-shade lamp, but not strong enough for shooting.

Using the overhead light in the room. Lol camera shadow on background.


I call this one, "Kidney Failure".

Unfortunately, I can't seem to get rid of that yellow tint when shooting at night. The white balance on my camera is always hard to get right, even during the day.

More to come...

Experimental Animation: v2.1

Had a rethink of my idea and figured out a way to still get the texture of the beads without having to fiddle around with the damn things all the time and extend my shooting time to a ridiculous amount I just don't have.

1. Make a drawn template for my animated objects. In this case, you can see the two fish models I'm using, with one smaller than the other.

2. Stick double-sided tape onto clear plastic sheets (in my case, ripped out of a display folder).

3. Cut tape+plastic into required shapes.

4. Peel off the double-sided tape backing. In this case, I'm using the bubble I made as an easier example, because the fish were really fiddly.

5. Stick beads to sticky plastic shape.

6. Make sure they form a good shape and are mostly covering the plastic.

7. Coat the whole thing in clear adhesive (you know, the kind you get with the awesome fumes?) and leave it overnight until it sets, and now you have a bubble!

8. Or a fish!

9. Which you can then segment using your handy craft-scalpels. The beads aren't friendly to scalpel blades, though, so don't use a really favoured or expensive blade for the cutting.

To Be Continued...

Test Result: Fail

Attempted to animate the beads today.

Didn't work out too well.

The beads were less fiddly than sand but still too uncontrolable to get a decent action of changing movement. Also I had trouble getting the manual focus on the camera right, since the viewscreen is pretty dodgy on my old Pentax and you don't get to see the image until after you've taken it.

Back to the drawing board.

Experiemental Fish Animation: Pitch & Storyboards

For my 2D & Alternative Techniques experimental animation assignment, I want to focus on the exploration of texture and movement by using beads to animate on hand-drawn backgrounds. Though partly inspired by Ishu Patel's Bead Game (1977), I am not intending to use the beads in the same way, or focus on a non-traditional experimental narrative and theme. Instead I am going to depict a more traditional - though simple - narrative of a goldfish following a small bubble through the lily-filled waters of a lake, employing the beads in a more organic and randomised pattern, whilst still retaining the overall form of the goldfish and the bubble.

To properly render this animation I will be first creating storyboards (see below) and an animatic to guide my filming of the stop-motion beads using a home-made rostrum camera setup, utilising a digital SLR camera and my dining table at home. The soundtrack I will be using in this assignment is Camille Saint-Saëns The Aquarium from his Le Carnaval des Animaux (The Carnival of the Animals) suite. I have chosen this piece of music as the rise and fall of the different sections of the composition I feel best matches the movements of the fish through the water I am trying to depict in synchronious fashion.



1. The fish swims through the space in the lake between the lily pads.


2. The fish swims to the surface of the lake and creates a bubble with its mouth.


3. The fish follows the bubble deeper into the lake.


4. The fish chases the bubble diagonally across the background.


5. The fish follows the bubble in and around the stems of the lilies and out of shot, back and forth.


6. The bubble spirals down to the bottom of the lake, with the fish following.


7. The bubble settles on a small stone at the bottom of the lake.


8. The fish bumps the bubble and it bursts, causing the fish to be sad and ending the animation.