#36 Entering an animation tournament

I guess I'll keep this blog alive. A warning though, this post is using Adobe Flash for the animation talk and not Photoshop. Photoshop is for fancy animation, and I didn't want that. You'll see why if you keep reading.
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I made a video called About You for an animation tournament. It's about a guy who can't remember what happened to him after an accident. Apparently, I made it to the next round of this thing. But before I get to work on it, I want to show my process here. You know, for record-keeping.

First, I came up with the idea and wrote the script. I knew I had to come up with something fast since I was on a time limit, so I drew inspiration from a personal thing that happened to me.

 

Sorry for that first page. The program I use to write these things (Adobe Story) creates that page automatically. I'm not that pretentious. I didn't really focus on fixing the story, because I was already running behind on time. I like paying a lot of attention to my stories, but I guess I couldn't really do that this time.

Next came the dialogue recording. I got some of my friends to record the lines for me (and my sister for the voice of the mom). I don't like using my voice, because I can't really listen to it objectively. I don't know if it has a happy, annoying, or any other tone to it (and I can't ask anyone
I know, because I feel like they would always lie to make me feel good. Maybe I should ask you random people on the internet.). We recorded each scene in one go. As in, we recorded the whole first scene without stopping the recording, stopped it, and then recorded the second scene without stopping the recording, and stopped it. It doesn't matter if they made mistakes either. If they made a mistake, they would just start over from the same line they were on, and I would cut out the mistakes in editing. All the sounds were recorded in Adobe Audition by the way, as well as the sound mixing/editing.

Afterwards, I made the music on Reason. Because there is going to be actual prize money for this tournament, I don't want to deal with the hassle of paying another person for their music. I didn't want heavy instrumentals on this anyway. They were two simple instruments: piano and violin.

This was the setup for the first song on the video. ASAP (as simple as possible).

Audio mixing. I still don't know how this process works. I don't know when people plan the timing for their animations. Is it when they're mixing the sounds or when they're making the storyboard? For me, it's when I'm mixing the sounds. I usually just edit the audio together to where everything sounds normal, and then I save the whole thing as an mp3 and send it over to my animation program where it's ready to animate. Here's how the mix of the first scene looked like.

Design. Basically, the design for the room and characters. The design of the room was what I pictured in my head while writing the script, so I just went with it. Everything else I had to spend some time on planning. I really liked the outfit designs for Daniel and Blake. I don't usually draw designs on shirts, because they just make it more tedious to animate. For this video though, I felt it was needed.

The storyboard. This is where I laid everything out with very crappy drawings. I numbered the script and the drawings on the storyboard accordingly, so I could tell where the shots would change and such. Look at the following images and you'll understand.

 

       

 

Yes, the shots and movement in the video are very lazy, and that was the plan all along. I guess it was an experiment for me, to see if I could create an interesting story with just static drawings and moving mouths. 

Animation. There's nothing much to talk about here except one thing. That is, how I drew everything out so it'd be easy to fill in the colors later on. So here it is, ASAP: Since the bucket tool in Flash fills in areas that are completely closed off, I had to make sure some areas were open where I wanted the same color to spread into. Just so I wouldn't have to click more times with the bucket tool than I needed to. 

For example, I made sure to make the ear look like this:

Instead of this:

So I wouldn't have to click twice with the fill-in bucket, in that little hole and then outside of the hole. It's a real time saver when you have to do this for a hundred other frames or so.
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That's it. I don't know why I did this. There's just a lot I wanted to talk about, but nobody to talk about it to. I don't know many people that would be interested in hearing of the design of an ear. 

Thanks for reading all of this! It means a lot. I guess I just revealed more about myself to you guys, posting my Newgrounds account and whatnot, but whatever. You probably don't care, but you can find all of the other videos I've made in Flash there. I wonder... Maybe for the next animation in this tournament I'll use Photoshop. We'll see.

Sayonara.

#32-35 Mistakes were made

 I'VE RISEN.

Now there's some explaining to do. To keep the weekly posting tradition alive, I'll write what I was up to each week from the last post until now.

WEEK ONE.
In the last post, I wrote that I had the story laid down. And I did have something, trust me, but it wasn't as solid as I had said. It still felt weak. So this week, I was still making changes to the story, but I also started making the rough draft of the whole thing. The slight notion bubbled up inside of me that said I was not good at planning.

WEEK TWO.
As I made more and more of the rough draft, I realized this was in no way going to be five pages long. This was a problem, but I said whatever. I still wasn't even sure of what the story was going to be about, so I decided to carry my rough draft to the end and see if I could come up with some story along the way. I had made about seven pages at this point.

WEEK THREE.
To be honest, I didn't work on anything this week, mainly because of final projects and tests. I might've made like two extra pages of the rough draft, but I can't even remember. It's all a blur. I had to spend some all-nighters finishing up said projects, so give me a break. It happens to everyone.

WEEK FOUR.
This week. I finished the draft, and a lot of stuff was changed from anything I had originally written about the story. All of the pages are at the bottom of this post. It is 20 pages long, so there is no way I'll finish this by the time I leave school. My graduation is tomorrow. All I'm thinking about now is the stupidly long amount of time this planning time took. It's my last project, so I just wanted it to be awesome. Mistakes were made.

Anyway, if you want to know about the story without having to decipher the very crude drawings in my draft, I'll give a short summary here. Obviously, spoiler warning*.

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SUMMARY:

The story takes place in the future. The main character, Tom Shemwell, is the 'leader of the nations,' so that basically means he controls what goes on in the whole world. He dreams about a conversation he has with an alien and he's told that the alien race is going to destroy the humans within three days. That alien just wanted to give Tom the professional courtesy of letting him know.

Tom doesn't know if that dream was an actual thing that happened or not. He settles on it being a real thing after people find out about a weird ball of light in space orbiting Jupiter, implying that that's the alien's ship. Tom tries to contact it, finding out more about it, and straight up destroying it, but nothing happens. He realizes that the world IS actually ending in three days (I forgot to bluntly state it for people to understand it in the comic, but Tom decides to not tell anyone about his dream or about the fact that they're all dying). The next day, he decides to make some legislative changes that gives more money and power to the poor that would destroy the world economy in the long run, but since the world is ending in a few days, it wouldn't matter.

Throughout this time, we figure out he has a wife, but he's actually in love with one of his bodyguards, a guy called Gabe. He's secretly having a small affair with him. I figured this whole story was about keeping a huge secret, so I wanted the main character himself to have a secret that he was already hiding before being thrust into this bigger problem of the world ending. All of this helps me explain what happens on the third day, which is that Tom takes Gabe and, together, leave their jobs to spend the day with each other, not worrying about anything and focusing on being happy. I didn't know how to end it, so I just wrote: 'On the third day, more people died happier than if Tom hadn't made those changes.' Or something like that. If you check what I wrote and find out it's not that, just know that the line above is what I meant to write down.
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OH GOLLY, that sure took a long time to write. Obviously, there's a lot of changes I need to make. The story is all over the place. The point is, I finished the hard part. I think I know what my story's about now. All that's left is polishing, cleaning up, editing out stuff, and coming up with more synonyms to describe making the plot better.

Oh well, I'm not good at goodbyes, so-
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THE ROUGH DRAFT

Remember to not judge me based on what I make, even if that's what I do against other comic creators.

 *You might've asked yourself why I'm warning you guys of spoilers. Because that would mean I'm planning on making a completed piece. If it's my last day at school, and no more grades are being taken on this blog, why would I want to continue working on whatever it was that I had going on? Well, it's because I like doing it. And I want to finish this**. I probably will someday, so the question is if you want to wait until that day or if you just want to know what it's all going to be about before it comes out? THE CHOICE IS YOURS.

** So I might keep updating this blog. Hopefully, I'll have something else by the end of June. This might turn into something where I just post things once a month, but I don't know. If you check the blog out on the first of July and there's nothing there, that means I gave up on it, so you'll just have to accept it.