The End.

The last post for class! well, about the secret garden. i've wanted to animate this book for a loooong time, and since now was a chance that i actually could i jumped at the opportunity. i tried to choose a scene that would have a fair amount of action and movement, as well as a bit of emotion, so that i could try a range of things to animate.

i did finish the project, i finished everything i wanted to, but if i had a bit if extra time, there are several things i'd like to smooth out. in many of the scenes the animation is almost more of an animatic. i left the less important scenes as just keyframes, but only because i knew at my speed and with my perfectionist tendencies i would never get them finished, so instead i concentrated on fully animating the most important acting scenes.

once i can get the file compressed down, i'll be able to upload it here....

have a great summer, everyone! :)

Secret Garden Update

hm, so what to update about? well, perhaps it would be interesting to see what a hard time ui had designing Dickon. yes, i know he's a marginal character in my animation, but i felt it was still very important that i get him right even though he only comes in at the end. he's my favorite character, so basically i'm just doing it for myself, but i can't help being a perfectionist. :) here's some pages from my sketchbook, where i was just trying to get his face right:





i ended up going into my PHOTO ARCHIVES *DUHN DUHN DUUUUUHN!!!* for reference from some of my smaller friends, so you can see a bit of that on the second page. i think i got him right in the final version i posted a couple days ago. :)

Professor Delao said he'd like to see our method of animation as well, i think, so i'll explain that a bit. basically, i copied the techniques i've learned about traditional animation into flash. you can see it in my layers. i would start with the rough animation, to get the action and positioning on the background correct (the BG layer). i'd use lighter colors (so it'd be easy to trace over) and switch color whenever i went over to tighten something up.



so that's basically the "pencil test" of traditional animation. once that's all good, i would add a new layer and trace over my rough lines, and to color i would just use the fill tool, with reference from a color key i'd made earlier in photoshop. this is the "ink and paint" step.



i haven't done anything fancy with the lines or vector curves, because of time issues, but really i do like that hand-drawn bit of quality it can give to leave it as rougher drawn lines, even if they're digital.

i haven't finished enough animation to call for an update on that, but of course i'm still working on it. i've got two more days, and i think i'll be able to finish it. wish me luck. :)

Animation Updatten

Dickon Color Key

quick color key for dickon. gosh, it's hard to get kids to look the right age. he's 12.

mary character sheet

ta-daaaa! finished. will have an animation update up here soon.

BG the last one

that's the last one! still animating - i've got a lot of the roughs and have finished a lot of cleanup and color as well. also recorded all the sound i'll need with cogle and zelda on sunday; thank goodness for elaine knowing about whatever that odd sound program was in the booth because i couldn't have figured it out unless i'd had a couple hours to just fiddle with it. so now i just have to get those sound effects and things edited up and matched in.

i'll probably upload another progress animation clip either tonight or tomorrow since i've gotten a lot finished since that last one. also got some good sketches for one of scully's characters for his lilith morningstar story. AND i need to scan in those inked mary drawings; i recently realized that i never did post a complete character sheet for her. ^^;;;

ciao for now.

BGs 9 and 10

9 is a short pan. ^_^

cleanup/color update

i wish i had time to fully animate EVERYTHING, but i've gotta make sure i can actually finish this project before i go in and polish things up more. and noooow, i'm gonna go get some sleep. ta.

Robin

HAH! so, i'm doing rough animation of the robin, and i get on google for some reference images and lo! i realize, all this time i've been drawing an american robin, when the story takes place in england, and therefore i need to be drawing a european robin, which looks quite a bit different. good thing i hadn't started cleanup yet. :)

hatred

I HAAAAAAAAA8TE maya.

....sigh....

BG scene 8

hah. i like this-a one. :)

update on secret garden

i've been continuously working on backgrounds and rough animation for the past week or two, despite the lack of updates. (sorry about that.) technically, i've got 7 more backgrounds to do, but 3 of the 7 are just zooms of previous backgrounds so i suppose there're actually 4.

the animation for scene 1 is completely finished, and i have the rough for scenes 2 and 3 nearly finished. it's finally beginning to come along. :) here's what i've got so far:




again, only the first scene is completely finished, and because of the resolution and backgrounds it's difficult to even tell what the rough animation is doing. but... yes. there we go.

BG scene 7

scene 6 was a zoom shot too.

i don't like this one overly much; the vines on the right and the trees in back i would have liked to redraw, but there simply isn't time. pity.

Jenny's Porch

initial pass on my first maya project for valentine's class. critique is appreciated, though there's no guarantee that i'll be able to fix things. maya loathes me. :P

BG scene 4

here's scene 4, and since scene 5 is just a close-up of this i don't think it's necessary to post.

BG scene 3

another pretty but boring picture for you to look at. :) background for the 3rd shot.

BG scene 2

another quick update. background for the second scene- lovely and boring! didn't take very long, almost all copied elements from the background from scene 1. it makes me feel annoyed that i don't have time to really draw each background, but this'll work well too.

BG scene 1

quick update- completed the edits on the opening background, the big pan shot. the best thing about this is that i can copy a lot of the textures into the other backgrounds. whee! on to the next.

(on a humorous note: turning the trees behind the wall blue was a complete accident, and i love it.) ^_^

storyboards pg. 6-8

the last storyboards for the animation. now for backgrounds. :)