Overall Year Report

Overall Year Report

This Year has flown by so very fast but over the seemingly short amount of time I have been on my course I have picked up many new skills, developed old skills much further, pushed my self to new levels, did many things which I though seemed almost impossible such as 3D modeling and animating on cinema 4D I programme which I had no experience on at all till joining the course and last but not least came up with a few good creations along the way.

 including my latest venture an Animation for the E4 Stingers competition in which you create an animation to promote the channel using any means of animation you see fit, For this I decided to use a mixture of different animation techniques, moving on to my animation I have created a character called afro bum who is drinking malt liquor and is attacked by an afro comb thrown by a hater, thus coming to the out come of it smashing on the floor and making him sad, I had a brain storm for the last part I made the liquid that was allover the floor into the shape of the E4 logo for my reveal, I was going to have no reveal but I decided it was needed.

I created a cut out and a roto-scoped style scene for the scenes when afro bum drinks his malt liquor, The rest was just simple frame by frame animation and rotations for the spinning afro comb, as far as animations go as with many projects there were some improvements and a couple of things I could have done better but I believe it was a fairly good production short.

Straying back to my first projects that I did I can truly see the errors of my ways I have improved slightly with my work flow over this past year and the amount of work I have produced has become also a lot better,  but I still struggle a little to meet deadlines and put enough content into my work , such as my strange edweard Muybridge moving images, I created a small loop in which I drew over each individual image in edweard Muybridge’s walking up stairs sequence, I then copied the first loop pasted it after the first loop and moved each image up a step to create the illusion of my character walking up a staircase I then repeated this until the character was no longer visible on screen.

As always though I kept getting distracted and trying to do other things at the same time as I was creating my loop such as  the punch which I transformed into my character bouncing a basketball, and it ended up where I had a half baked very sketchy looking walk cycle and a short completed loop of my character bouncing a basketball, although since this was the first animated work I had produced on Photoshop I was still most pleased with it.

Speaking of sketchy looking animation and errors, in a recent project I was told to create a metamorphosis of an animal turning into a machine, I decided to morph a bullfrog into a Cadillac using the bullfrogs large throat as the morph scene, but this did not go as planned I neglected this animation due to bad time keeping and tried shape tweening to clean up my mess.

Shape tweening is a feature on flash in which a shape is morphed into another shape e.g. a square into a ball, I seen this and thought it would be a good way to morph my bullfrog into a Cadillac during my moment of panic I decided to use this method to try and take a short cut and the results were terrible.

Instead of just blending the two shapes together as it did with the square and circle my  bullfrog shape broke up into tiny pieces a bit like a jigsaw and then regrouped to form my Cadillac shape with this looking absolutely terrible I tried to liven it up with some pretty swirls and coloured beads but this just magnified how terrible the morph actually looked, with no time left I had to do the best I could with the time I had, the moral of this story do not use the shape tweening tool on flash unless you know exactly what your doing.

If there is anything that I would like to improve on it would have to be getting a lot more input into my animations not just animation wise but the paperwork and story boarding behind them also, saying as I have been neglecting it a lot recently, I think this is all due to my bad time keeping which I shall be greatly improving I have figured that if I create a timetable or a certain work schedule for myself on days when I am least busy and set a piece of work to do in each free period I can make up greatly next year for the lack of research and development work I have produced in this current year.

I have involved a lot of negative content in a lot of the subjects written here today but I would just like to point out that I am not a failure I just believe that this year has shown me what I’m truly capable of and what I must improve and sharing this with others is also an excellent way of getting feedback from others on techniques that they use to solve problems etc. creating the best possible outcome for my future projects.

I have been set a summer task to create a two minute animation using any method that I feel comfortable with, and I think for me that would be roto- scoping due to my last project being such a big success in my eyes, so during the summer holidays I shall be developing ideas and creating my own full length animation which I will keep updated here on my blog to show my progress, so keep an eye out!