Teehee ^_^

(www.threadless.com)- forgot to study. (lovin the doodlins)

Let's face it.

Due to my perfectionist nature, i've been going back and forth just trying to perfect and tweek every detail before moving on-- which at this point is probably what i shouldn't be concentrating on and should be getting a move on, since my deadline is on Tuesday 4:20pm :l.

Compared to my storyline, i'm only on frame 12 out of 57. Great. I've started to face the fact that i probably won't get all my animation finished.

Looking back, i should have probably tried to charge on ahead without getting scared of the unknown complications of Flash; however, i didn't do this and instead tried to prepare myself against oncoming problems and stuff i haven't yet learnt (i.e. walk cycles)... i watched many YouTube tutorials in which they all do things differently. Many of them suggest or recommend using the bone tool exclusive to Flash CS5. But these stupid bone armatures seem to disappear every time i come back to them, making me have to wiggle them around until they appear EVERYTIME i want to work on it again :l. When i told this to my tutor, he said he doesn't trust this bone tool new crap and instead relies on old school classic tweening and frame by frame animation-- and if saved in a graphic, i can play the same walk cycle over n over without redoing it again like i do with effing bone tool.

Here's some of the tutorials i watched for Flash walk cycles: (some of which didn't help me at all or had an annoying man sucking his teeth every 5 seconds)





How To Do a Walking Animation

VTC- Animating with the Bone Tool


Anyway- here's my animation so far. I decided to change the horrific font to something more personal- like a handwritten font. I found this off of Dafont.com- recommended by an advertising student i'm working with in another project. I've decided that i LOVE this font site (so easy to use!!!) and will definitely be using this in the future.

Total Meltdown

Yesterday i had a massive panic attack because for some reason Flash deleted half of my layers and my animation was completely ruined. I have still now, no idea what happened.
I went into uni and a life saver uni tutor showed me a way to keep things neat and tidy and copied all my work into another flash file and i learnt how to "nest" all my work so it's safer to work with and basically makes more sense.

This is what happened:

And this is what it looks like now: (in progress- still ALOT to do "boooooo!" :( )

Research...

Looking at rolling camera transitions

Hahahaaaa!!!

Today we played around with the cut outs with photos idea.

Here is Ashlea saying "Frolo"... Why? We don't know but it's quite funny.

Walk Cycle Test on Flash

I'm a beginner on Flash so excuse the crapness but today i tried to create a walk cycle BY MY SELF.
Have a look see- my man kinda looks a little ghetto :l

ps: Flash doesnt like to go onto my blog so im sorry for the weird ghost print that happens in the video. I swear that's not actually there...

I think this worked out quite well, considering my man has no toes :( and he bobs around a bit as he walks, his knees probably bend too much and he stays too long nearer the ground...

This is the same walk cycle- now with a background. This is to give me an idea of what my chosen style will look like. I think i may play around a bit more with stage colour so that it won't look so plain.

Styles

I'm trying to research some interesting animation styles for the confectionary project... a simple (and obvious) 2-D or 3-D animation wouldn't exactly be the most striking so we thought we'd do some research to try and spark up some inspiration:


I LOVE this style! always have. It's a mix between 3-D and 2-D.. almost like putting 3-D on a 2-D space. The characters have a sort of cut out effect, yet they're able to change their expressions- how do they d this?? it almost seems like magazine or photograph cut outs mixed with flash... it gives the advert an endearing charm- it reminds me of a kid playing around with paper dolls.

This advert reminds me of:

I used to watch this alot as a kid- looking back, im not sure why since the main character Angela has THE MOST ANNOYING VOICE IN THE WORLD. But, i did really like the animation style. Again, similar to the British Gas style but the characters seem more greyed out, like newspaper cut outs. The creators must have taken pictures of the characters from various angles and do the basic mouth shapes for talking (similar to normal 2-D animation) and then use Flash to switch the movements to make them look like they're talking.

Something slightly different:

I've always loved PES animations- they're so fun and creative! The method of using found objects to replace other things is ingenius and i know that it'd be hard to do this style for our idea but nonetheless- i absolutely love the idea. Maybe we could use actual rolos to replace animated ones??


Researching for actual cut out animations- i found this. It's very short but this animator used after effects to create the inbetweens for cut out movements. Therefore, making the overall style quite smooth and cartoony. i need to learn how to use after effects!!!

Life Drawing: Character Design

For this brief, we have to design 3 characters and put them in their environment. At the moment, i'm just designing my characters and several poses they could do to put them in a suitable composition.

My theme is burlesque/cabaret/50's pin-ups. Basically overly sexy poses which are making my housemates question my sexuality.

i'm definitely straight, I promise. I just love drawing women because they have more a shape and i tend to find it more fun to exaggerate and change them etc.

Anyways, this is stuff i've done so far: the first picture is a human figure i drew from imagination without any sort of cartoony style. Also, my style has been heavily influenced by the work of Rion Vernon, famous 1st pin-up girl Bettie Page and Jessica Rabbit- however, all these sketches i've drawn are my own, and some have been created using a burlesque pose photo reference (i exaggerated these poses myself).

i just noticed that the girl on the right looks a bit SpumCo'esque lol