Bacon Torpedo

Now we're onto After Effects....
Actually we've been on AE for about two weeks. We spent a week learning After Effects with Matt, but everything I rendered would NOT work... as it turns out there was a problem with my Quicktime settings, but Mike fixed it for me. So, here's a quick video of some of the exercises we did with Matt; he gave us a bunch of resources - videos, music, images - so that we could learn how to do things like masking, effects, compositing, and so on. He didn't give us the music in this video though - I added that to make it more exciting.



It should be noted at this point, that Matt has inhuman levels of patience, matched only by his bottomless and encyclopaedic knowledge of software like Maya and After Effects. If that man has a Twitter account, I'm using Foamee to owe him a beer.


9/10/07

Now, we've received our briefs, and mine and Ben's is from Griffilms. What we have to do is, create a 20 second title sequence for a (fictional) cooking show called The Big Feast; we also have to create 5 second stings for two segments called "Feast Off" and "Feasty-cuffs". I'm not sure entirely what I'm doing yet, but Griffilms said we can use whatever music we want, so I'm going with Eat the Rich by Motorhead..... I've also decided that since it's an entirely fictional programme that I'm going to have Arnold Schwarzenegger presenting it. Yup.


So here we go: first of all, a 5-second sting for "Feast-Off", featuring Jo Brand. know it's not very accomplished, but by this point I was running out of ideas, as well as After Effects know-how!



Here we have the other sting, for "Feasty-cuffs"; a very difficult proposal, this section of the challenges contestants to eat some cream crackers as fast as they can.... in any case, for this one I made a body for Arnold in Flash, then used After Effects CS3's brand new puppet tool to make him move. yes, this was my first time using it, which is why it looks quit iffy lol. I quite like the way that the music synchs up with it though!

Maya Brief: Completed

Yup, believe it or not this took three weeks! Not inlcuding the week we spent cramming Maya information into our brains. Basically there's my little ole granny iMac whinging at the Razr phone. The weird flickering light there is meant to be the TV in question, but I guess that didn't turn out quite right. As for the composition, when I was actually using Maya, everything was in shot; when it was rendered, the top of the computer got cut off a bit. I suppose that's because Maya sucks (it really does).

Delayed!

Yeah so I didn't manage to update at all last week.... Maya is a real bitch. I can never figure out how to do what I need to do when modelling. I'm there, almost, but I still need textures. And now comes the nightmare of animation! And I still need to figure out how th make the lighting look like the glow from a telly.... hmm. Anyhow, the dialogue I'm using is from the old TV show Dinosaurs (I think), and has the grandma character moaning about television to her daughter:

Grandma: "Television is responsible for the utter degradation of our society. We should write letters."
Mother: "Mom?"
Grandma: "What?"
Mother: "Get a life."

So there! Now I shall get back to it, and hopefully get this thang finished by the end of the week! In the meantime, here's a picture I drew....

Maya

This heat is killing me!!

Last week (or rather the friday before) we began learning Maya, with the aid of Matt Leonard of Sphere VFX. Let's just say that it's lucky for us he knows his onions.
Anyhow, we started of learning the basics - creating shapes, moving around the workspace, modelling and all that - and spent the week learning a buttload of things that we would surely forget the next day. Nevertheless, Matt provided us with some spiffy notes and books to reference, and this week we were given our industry briefs. This time mine is from Griffilms, and involves animating an inanimate object to some dialogue of my own choosing. This is infinitely more tricky than it sounds. I have chosen my objects, and I am modelling a G4 iMac and a Motorola RAZr because.... why not?

I shall reveal my chosen dialogue.... next week!

Playing Catchup

Been a while since I've shown my face on here!

Okay, week before last Tim Allen came in. No, not the unfunny actor from such (s)hits as Home Improvement and The Santa Clause, but another graduate of GCADT who has worked on such shows as Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam, and Creature Comforts. Not only that, but he was one of the lead animators on Corpse Bride! Oh yuss. Off the top of my head, he's done the scene with the long table when Barkiss is making his speech and the dead start turning up; in fact I think he was the main animator for Barkiss altogether.

So a few of us have met him twice before; once when he did a talk at GCADT and once when he did a talk at a WAG meeting, so we'd seen a lot of his stuff before. This time thouhg he brought a DVD packed with bunches of other stuff, including recent showreels, his student work, and bits from TV shows like Creature Comforts and El Nombre, and an animated version of Peter and the Wolf. He also had a lot of solid advice to offer on acting in animation, because he's a very good character animator and is known for being able to put a lot of subtlety into his work. he is also, by the sound of it, one of the hardest working animators in animation! I say this based on the amount of time he spent travelling to different companies and looking for work when he started out, going all over the country and arranging interviews with bunches of companies in the same areas! All in all it was a good morning, and he even brought some artefacts from stuff he's worked on like scripts and production scrap books and the like. Hopefully he'll be coming back in the not too distant future

Dinamo Flash Brief

Okay, this is the result of the Dinamo Flash brief that I've been doing. Kind of.

When I tried exporting it as a .swf file, it kept putting one of the sound effects out of place; then I had trouble publishing it as a .avi, but when i finally did, it seems to have put some of the animation out of place (as it is here). I guess I need to try exporting it on my home computer. Anyway, have a look and see whatcha think.

This morning we had to pop over to Dinamo and present our aniamtion to the fellows in the studio, namely Aron and Ben. They seemed quite pleased with what we had produced, although Ben was somewhat confused becasue he had written the brief believing that everyone would be doing it, rather than the setup we had where 2 people worked on one of 3 briefs. We left the Flash files with them so they could have a look at our file and layer organisation and naming (oh bloody hell mine is gonna give them a headache) and they should be in touch soon.

A Digital Pimp of Some Sort

Cyfle now has all our videos - the Digital Storytelling ones anyway - on a single channel on You Tube. So if yez wanna see our work, that's the place to see it.

THEPAINOFANIMATION

I have started animating on the Dinamo brief. Or trying to. I always find it a bit difficult animating if I haven't done so for quite a while; with the added complication of graphics within graphics within graphics within graphics, my mind is starting to slowly unravel. The feeling may best be described as "cruntpiscule".

The Moose Style: Charcter Designs

Progress on the Dinamo Flash brief continues. Here's the character designs I've done, I've just finished some lip synch and now I have to continue making body shapes in the library before animating. So much do, so little time (one more week to be precise)...

Magic of The Moose

Ryan Neal at Dinamo told me to check out Chris Phillips, yet another GCADT graduate, upon whose style the Moose is apparently based. Anyway, it's all very good, so GO LOOK NOW.

Picture by Chris Phillips:

Dinamo: Week 1

Bit of a late update I'm afraid.

On Monday we got our Flash briefs for the next three weeks. The Bobinogs brief from Calon was assigned to Mike and Ben; Griffilms gave Kei and Gary a brief based on Mr. Stunt Butt; and Jen and I got an animation test brief from Dinamo.

Of the three, ours was the loosest; we were given a 19 second piece of dialogue, to shich we have to animate, and the only direction we have is that it is to be in the style of The Moose. So far I've done some charcter design (although after feedback from Ryan Neal I have to adjust them somewhat to fit in with the style), and I'm doing an animatic in Flash. Actually, I've started making my library too - for it must be kinda cut out animation - which I'm not scheduled to do until next week. So... back to work!

Busy Busy Busy

I haven't posted anything for a few days because I've been so involved with getting this Eisteddfod animation finished. In the end, a group of staff from Cyfle and S4C got together to decide which animation they were going to use. They chose mine.

This was quite surprising, considering it's rather cheap-looking and features a one-eyed alien (not the first thing you'd associate with Wales, but there you go). So over the weekend I've been tweaking the animation and grabbing some simple sound effects to use. Now I've given Mike the .fla files, and it's up to him to come up with a t-shirt image. Me, I'm just happy because over the weekend I found my DS, and we saw the Simpsons film yesterday; it was freakin' sweet.

Eisteddfod

Like I said, we're meant to be doing animation for these mobisodes: 3 segments of 10 second animation that link up sequentially. I don't really know what's going on regarding the finished animation; we're all kind of working separately on different things at the mo'. Here's one of my little bits of animation (the second one). It's pretty poor, because I went with using graphics and stuff (why not eh?) rather than drawing each frame and because it's on 12 frames a second, in order to be used for mobile phone downloads.

FLASH!

Er, okay. It's wednesday and the middle of the week, and on Monday we started this Flash project to create 'mobisodes' for the Eisteddfod and whatnot. I'm okay with Flash - that is, I know how to do drawn animation, and I know my way around the software quite a bit, and when putting the two together I can usually come up with something decent. I'm not so hot, though, at using shapes and tweens and graphics and other such things of that nature. That's where Marc Lewis comes in: another ex-GCADTer, he knows his Flash. He went through some basics of using graphics and mask and paths and things with us, which is great because now I'm starting to fill in some blanks with using the software. Yesterday we got to grips with some lip sync, but I've done lots of that already and I used some sound from my Digital Storytelling Project, so I don't think I'll bother putting that up anywhere. Anyhow, I shall continue with the Flash stuff now, we're meant to be putting these things together by the end of the week.
Finally, seeing as I like to accompany as many posts as I can with at least one picture or video, I've uploaded a bit of some test I've done; they're utterly pointless, this was just me getting to grips with using nested graphics and tweens.

In any case, here's the finished digital storytelling:

Digital Storytelling Stills

Here are a few stills from the project. The whole thing qas done on my laptop - which is at home - so I've grabbed a bunch of images. I will upload the finished video when I've got the audio levels adjusted properly.

Fight Through The Pain

I've just about done my digital storytelling project, though I had to stay up till 5am to work some stuff out (plus my computer sucks). I just thought I'd stick up a sample of some of the limited animation that I've included in the project.

Meez

Weird 3D avatars at Meez.com

Work in Progress 2

Starting to make progress with the digital storytelling; now editing sound and producing finished Flash images. Here a a few of them.

Work In Progress

Alrighty then, here's a few development sketches for my digital storytelling project, together with a sample of what the finished style should look like.

Hooray for Polls!

Last week Blogger added a polls feature to Blogger In Draft. And after almost seven days of eager anticipation, I was finally able to add my own poll! You can see it on the right hand side of this blog.


.....Hell's teeth, I'm such a geek.