#13 Title Not Found

I didn't have time to do much this week. With no idea of what I'll do for my long video, I just decided to make another gif...

It's not that great, but it gave me time to think about what I'll do.

I noticed that I suck at animating faces. If you look at the gif above, you'll notice that the face goes all over the place. I want to get better at that. And also, what I suck at the most is at making someone talk (You haven't seen my attempts. They're bad).

Now, a website that I frequent gives animators a small audio clip to animate. It's a monthly challenge where the winner gets the chance to have his/her animation critiqued by a person currently working in the animation industry. I'm probably not going to win since there's people way better than me that enter the competition, but I'm still going to try. It'll give me a chance to see how sounds work in PS and (more importantly) how to animate faces without making them jump around.

As for how I'll go about it, I decided to wait until this month's competition ends so I can start at the beginning of the next one. Next week, I'll create two character models in anticipation of the next voice clip. I'll make a funny and a serious looking character whose genders could easily be reversed for conveniences' sake. If I have extra time, I'll learn how to import sound and make it work in PS. I have yet to look at how that works.

That's it for this week. As a goodbye, here's the sketch I started out with to figure out what my gif would be about.

:D

#12 Are we humans... or are we flamingos?

Tadaa!

I learned this, from my last study:

I'm posting this first so that it'll appear as the thumbnail for people following me. Nobody's following me, but it's good to plan ahead. I like looking professional, haha. 

Anyway, first comes the planning talk...

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My Model Sheet.

 

I figured out the guy's anatomy under the cape. And to see how expressive his figure is, I tried to simplify him,  his name being Elodie, to the point where he's just two shapes. I think it looks pretty good.  I forgot that I wasn't going to use color, so there's no need to worry about this guy looking like Harry Potter. Now, I have to make the Ostrich's Model Sheet. The design of these two need to look connected somehow.

This was really quickly made, so it's not worthy of looking all professional. His glasses were originally supposed to fall off when he transformed, but this is better. His cane is the only thing that falls, which I think to be rather fitting for him.
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So that's all I wrote for the last step of planning. The next part is the animation talk.

This is going to sound crazy, but listen... I like it! My plan for just focusing on what I wanted to learn worked!

 I decided to make it super simple, so I could focus on just the transformation. The things I didn't like was how 2d it ended up looking (because it was just a boring side view), the choppiness of the flamingo, and the rough lines. The rough lines was a dumb mistake. I left the brush as a pencil tool thinking I was going to fill in the animation with color later, even though I said I wouldn't be doing that. The paint brush would have left a smoother line. But gladly, the rest was just extra stuff I didn't really want to pay attention on.

I'm just glad the transformation looks awesome! I would've liked to add more frames so everything could look smoother. But I think I did a good enough job to pat myself on the back. I understand now that, when morphing things, you just have to know where everything begins and where it's going to end up. If you know that, the inbetweening will be a piece of cake!
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*Cue: Human by The Killers*

And that, ladies and gentlemen, marks the end of the second season of this blog! Sadly,  this is the last study I will make for a while.

Anyway, next week I'm going to start planning for my first short film, which will be made exclusively in Photoshop (and probably edited together in Premiere, which I already have some knowledge on... So it's all good there...). It will be from thirty to sixty seconds long, and it will be amazing. I have no idea what it's going to be about, but just know that it will rock your socks off.

This post has gone on for far too long. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. I will stop... now.

#11 It's Morphing Time

Yo.

This is my last study before I try to make my own short, 30 second long video. I'm scared. Although I am feeling pretty confident about how to use Photoshop.

This time, my study will be over another one of the French school videos, Chaman. I'm sorry for making all of my studies over videos from the Gobelins student animations. It's just that I've found that they all have an insane amount of variety and creativity.

Trying new things out for the blog.

This is a clip from Chaman.

That scene above is the one I'm going to learn from. Only looking at the 'birdman', I love the fluidity of the transformation. To be honest, I have no idea how Vincent Nghiem managed to make everything flow from one extreme to the next. The eyes, nose, and mouth move with a crazy amount of clarity. It looks simple to make, but I really doubt it's going to be easy to mimic.

I also like how it has the same color scheme as my Gific (Comic Gif) from last week.

My friend, Humza, gave me a cool idea for my study. He told me to make a guy with a limp turning into an ostrich. It sounds really hard, and I'm probably going to get annoyed from not doing it right again. But I want to make it. So screw it.
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I made some characters for my cripple:

The numbers, from least to greatest, are the ones that I like the most to the ones I like the least. I'm going with number 2, because his pose is cool and his cape falls over him in a more fashionable way.  Actually, now that I think about it, he looks a little bit like Harry potter. It's probably just because of the color of the cape. And the glasses. But I want to show the glasses falling off of him when he transforms, so I don't want to take that off...

OH WELL. I'll just change the color of the cape.

Also, the cape was just there for decoration, but my teacher thought it was going to be the tail of the ostrich when he transformed. That idea sounds cool, so I'm going with it. I'll come up with everything else next week.

I feel like I'm a bit behind schedule. Again.

Sigh.

#10 Double Digits!

I whipped up a cheap script really quickly.

That's what Mitch is supposed to say. He's going to be all emotionless throughout it, but then he's going to whip out a small smirk after saying the last line.

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And here it is! 

INTROSPECTIVE TIME

I was going to make it just one gif, but I found that it lagged too much if I did it like that. Also, if you haven't already noticed, I didn't have time to finish it all; I didn't even get halfway. That's the problem with animation, everything takes too long to make. And yet again, I didn't even get to the part that I really wanted to work on.

Maybe this says something about me. I wanted to really focus on animating the words coming in from the guy, but I told myself I was going to do that last so I wouldn't be distracted by trying to finish the whole thing on time. You can see how well that turned out. I think I'm a guy that's more focused on the story side of things than the actual animation.

Still, I didn't start this blog to figure out what I like (well, maybe a little). I started it to learn new styles and processes in animation. That's why I won't focus on producing a completed gif next time. I want to focus on actually learning what I intend to learn. 

For my final study, I'll only work on what I want to learn. That might mean the whole thing won't look polished, like no color or smooth lines. The good thing will be that I'll know how to do the thing I actually set out to learn!

Okay, I'm done being so negative. I'll now briefly talk about what I really dug about this "gif comic". Three things, the character, the colors, and the flashing screens effect. You sort of saw how I came up with the character. It came through a creative session I was going through. Now with the colors, I thought of them by first picturing the flashing blue TVs. I thought, "how can I make the character stand out with this mayhem in the background?" So I just went and added some complimentary colors. And the color of the letters was, I guess, a tribute to Annie.

The flashing TV screens are the effects I loved making. That's the one awesome thing I can take out of all of this. I would make a tutorial on how to make them, but I don't have the time to. I think people would have wanted to see that... Sorry. Maybe next time, when I won't be too busy filling in the colors for every freakin' frame. 

Anyway, thanks for reading about my problems. It feels... weird.