#15 Too many characters

Everything's moving sort of fast now. I realized that I only have a week to complete this, and I haven't even finished designing the characters. I might have to do it outside of school. Nevertheless, I'm changing the type of hair the girl has to number three (refer to the last post if you don't understand). That way, not a lot of focus can be put on animating the follow through in the hair.

The proportion/reference lines I will come back to while animating.

Added clothes and color (even though I'm not going to use color for the final animation). She's very tomboy-ish looking. Just for fun and testing some color theory, I put color. I made her clothes very unsaturated so her skin colors could pop out. It looks alright.

It's the end of the week. I think I'm going to finish this outside of school, but I won't make a post about it. That'll have to wait until next year. Now that I think about it, I probably won't post next week. If that's the case, have some fun holidays people.

#14 Character Design & Story

The sound clip came out on the 11 second club website! You can go to it here, or you can read the transcript here:

Voice One: "I don't need to settle down. Tell him! Saul, tell him."
Voice Two: "Carrie... you're not yourself."
Voice One: "Of course I am!"

So by the sound of this, Carrie is Voice One. There's a Saul and a "him" in the scene, and one of those two is behind Voice Two. So three characters will be in the setting, but I'll only have to really animate two of them.  Also, I didn't post anything last week, because I forgot there there was a break for Thanksgiving. I say that to excuse myself for not having the character designs made yet. I'll need to that now...
  

Side note:I was being stupid and saving on jpg. 

I'm now using png.

Without focusing on the story going on in the sound clip, I made the designs for the faces of the characters (this is going to be Carrie). I started out with number one, and I kept refining the construction/proportion lines to find a good model for some 30-year old looking people. Number 6 is when I stopped, deciding it was good enough.

Because I'm stupid, I spent an insane amount of time planning how her hair would look. Going from left to right and top to bottom, I chose number six. Carrie sounds like one of those last century girls that feels she needs to look pretty to get a good husband. Thus, attractive, flowing hair would fit her perfectly.
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OK, I feel like I need to get a rough story people can follow before I go any further. The story is the driving force behind everything, including character designs, so I need to get that on lock-down. I got so caught up making Carrie's Design, I forgot why I was even doing it.

Really quickly, I've come up with the idea that Saul is Carrie's significant other. He has been diagnosed with some sort of disease that turned him into a really depressed dude (how I'm picturing him is sitting on a wheelchair, not talking, not moving, looking down at the floor. Expressionless throughout the whole scene). And this third guy, "him", is Saul's friend. They are all at the hospital where Saul has just been released from. Carrie and Saul's friend have just been told by the doctor that Saul won't get better. This is how they're handling it.

That's it. I ran outta time. I've got to get faster with this planning stuff. 

Until next week!

#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