#9 I can't say no to Annie

Have I been writing my posts in past-tense? I'm pretty sure I have, since I would usually write them at the end of the week. I don't want to check. I'm just writing this to say that I'll probably start writing in the present tense. That'd make things funner to read, I think. It makes the reader be more involved with the writer. I've only begun to think of this now, so don't judge me.

Anyhow, today, I'm going to start studying the effects in Annie. Upon seeing it, though, you'll notice that it barely has any effects. So what I mean is that I'll study the "word pop-up" effects. I like how they  used intricate lettering to add to the story. I know they probably used After Effects for the glows and maybe some gradients, but I want to be able to make the style just on Photoshop. That's what this blog's about, after all. (That is what I'm afraid of though, that I might have to learn a little about After Effects to see how it connects with PS. I don't mind learning it, the only problem is that the computers I use will more than likely not be able to handle the program.) Oh, and here's the making-of of Annie from one of the animators.

Here's what I'm going to make my study animation have from trying to mimic Annie's style:

• Pop-up words
• Glow to objects
• Active background, probably by flashing screens (although I won't make it as exaggerated to not cause any seizures. I'm tired of making crazy gifs like that.)

To try something different, I won't spend much time studying the short film. Instead, I'll focus on developing my own little clip.

I took the flashing screens very literally. Making this small doodle gave me the idea to make a commercial by a very apathetic man advertising a TV Emporium or something like that. Sadly, I probably wouldn't finish in time. So I'm just going to keep this shot and make the man talk about all of the different features these TV's have or something like that.

These are some character designs I made for the clip. I'm going with the guy on the top right. I'm also going to make things look cool by putting my name on pictures. It makes the sketches look really professional. It's cool! 

Colors add so much. I feel like an actual character designer now. If only my gifs looked just as cool. Maybe I should post the URL of the blog on the pictures in case people see the blog and want to share certain things with other people. I could become popular!.. Hmm, I hadn't really thought of all these things until now. We'll see what happens.

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I wasn't able to start on the actual animation, but a lot of the planning has been done. All I need to do now is actually make the clip. That's what I'll be working on next week. Wish me luck!

#8 Expressions to the Extreme

NOTE: Sorry I'm uploading this late again. When I was planning my schedule for this new season of learning PS, I didn't plan ahead for holidays or when I would get sick. I planned on spending two weeks on each study (refer to the last post if you don't know what I'm talking about), which would give me a total of five days of working on it at school. These two weeks, I only worked on it for three days, so this study didn't end up being as informative as I would've liked. But on the next study, I think it'll all be well. So...

Let's keep it going.

Let me just start by gushing all over Jelly Sunday's animation, because it's pretty awesome how much they were able to convey with such a small number of keyframes. To show an emotional change in the little girl's face, it goes from one drawing to the next with no inbetween except a small anticipation at the beginning. An example of this is at the 20-second mark. I loved that, because it expressed a lot of emotion, but it didn't require much work on the animator's part. And seeing why my animation from last week didn't look so real, I realized that the girl in the short film had a pony tail which kept moving after she went from one pose to the next. Basically I forgot to include some follow-through in my animation. It just made me see how much of the detail in the video was thoroughly thought out.

By the way, I use some words that might not make sense to people reading this if they don't know about the animation principles. If you want to learn, this video explains them perfectly.

Onto the next part of this post, here's the thingy I ended up making:

12 fps 

There are a lot of negatives about this animation, but there are also some positives. First, to start with the positives, I just want to say that this has been my longest gif. For that reason, I also had to cut back on some of the quality. Secondly, I really liked how I didn't have to put much effort into everything. I also liked the colors (although not the color's animation) and the follow through I was able to create with the ears.  

I will now stop boasting about my skills. Here's the negatives...

This animation sort of sucks. I think it's because I  just created this character out of the blue without planning ahead. His proportions change from one pose to the next, and it makes it have a very unprofessional quality to it. Adding to that, I should've moved his body as he changed positions. He looks really stiff. That's what the girl in Jelly Sunday looked like too, but it worked because she didn't have to turn around as much as this guy. 

It's also my style to add wobbly lines to static poses so it looks like the character's still alive. I never noticed until halfway through making it that Jelly Sunday didn't feature almost any wobbly lines. I hate myself for not noticing, but not as much as I do for not making his facial expressions as exaggerated as they could've been.  It looks like I didn't even try to exaggerate his face. That was the key thing I wanted this animation to have. I guess I just lost focus throughout making it. I need to focus on staying focused!

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Next week, the gif I post will be a rough animation of the one I will finish the week after that. I noticed that I don't have time to create a separate gif every week; I will just focus on making an amazing one every two weeks! That's all for this week guys. Peace out.

#7 Season Two of learning PS

For the next couple of weeks,  I'm going to shift the focus of this blog from learning about Photoshop's tools to learning about how other animators use the program. But since it's an incredibly hard task to be able to copy someone else's art style, I'm mainly only going to focus on replicating some part of their animation style. I'll just write down the films I'll study first, so I don't have to keep looking every time I'm done with one:

• The First one I want to focus on is Jelly Sunday for an attempt to animate people in a simple way. I'll be looking at Florian Parrot for this.
• The Second one is Annie for learning how to do effects. I'll look at Xavier Sailliol for this.
• The third one is Chaman to learn how to morph one thing into another, and I'll look at Vincent Nghiem for this.

It took me a while to find all of these. I guess this week was spent just watching some cool short animated films. Also, I missed a day of school this week, because I wasn't feeling well. So I'll start for real next week. I still wanted to do a gif though, and who's to say I can't do it from my house?

12fps

This is the type of animation style I liked about Jelly Sunday, but I'm going to try to make the whole thing way better next week. This is too simple. I know I said I would only focus on the animation side of the videos I'm studying, but if there's time, I think I'll also look at the art style.

See you next week!

#6 Rotoscoping

I finally finished it!

15fps

This took so much time, I couldn't make a post last week. Now that I'm finished with it, I can talk about the torturous workflow I had to go through. And if you don't want to read it, all I can say is that rotoscoping sucks.

So this is what happened.

I asked my buddy, Humza, to do something in front of the iMac's camera. He did some weird eyebrow dance for, about, ten seconds. When we were done recording on Photo Booth, I moved the video clip onto Photoshop. I think Photo Booth automatically records at fifteen frames-per-second so I was grateful for that when I noticed that those were the video settings on PS. At this point, I realized that ten seconds is a lot, so I decided to shorten the clip to two seconds, trying my best to make the video look like it loops just by where I decided to start and end it.

After that, I created a video layer, which is the one I would use to draw on. To not make the video distract me so much, I lowered its opacity to 30%. Then, with the new video layer I had on top, I began tracing my buddy's face frame by frame. The eyebrows were on a different layer so I could play with them without screwing anything else up. The body was also a static layer underneath the face's video layer. I only colored the whole thing, because the lines of the body were showing up behind the face as it moved. This reminds me that I forgot to color the whites of the eyes.

Oh well...

All in all, it was extremely boring. I don't know how people work on rotoscoping without passing out from boredom. It's a lot of work, and the feeling of accomplishment isn't as much as when you create something from your imagination (for me, at least). At least there's no doubt that the animation is going to end up looking good since you're basically just recreating the video reference.

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I think I'm done with learning the basics for photoshop. I want to learn more complicated things about it so next week, I'm going to try to mimic other people's animation style. My plan is to find three animators and make a short animation for each one of them to learn how they do things. Next week, the new season of Animating on PS begins!