Reflections

(Here's a link to a nicer version of my film)

     Making this film has been a great experience. The idea I ended up with was not the idea I planned on going with. I wanted to do something more colourful and detailed. Instead I ended up with a largely black and white piece with little detail, save for the backgrounds. The only reason I chose this piece was because it's story was the most developed and I couldn't think of anything better.
     I'm glad this was what I had to work with though. I didn't know how long it would take me to accomplish certain tasks. When asked "how long does it take you to animate an easy shot and a hard shot?", I wouldn't know what to tell you. And I dreaded the idea of clean-ups. Keeping your character uniform all throughout a shot is hard, and I was certain it would take me forever to do them. That's why I'm glad that for my first film my character design was simple. Now I have a pretty good idea of how much longer it would have taken me to clean-up a character with buttons, or even an outfit for that matter! Now I have a good idea how much longer it would have taken me to colour something more complicated since the only colours I had to deal with where mostly white and then gray and several shades of crimson.
     I was really surprised to find that I can animate pretty fast. Well.. certain shots still take me 4-6 hours, but simple shots are no big deal. I actually came upon some real "animator doubt" this year. It wasn't too bad, but it made me believe that I wasn't suited to be an animator and that I should just stick with storyboarding and character design. But work had to be done, and that meant I had to animate eventually. I tried animating one day and it looked like crap. It was like I had forgotten everything I was taught. I was angry that whole day. But the next day I decided that the feeling of anger wasn't helping me animate, so I deleted it and took things really slowly and re-learned how to animate. And now I know how to animate.
     I can't wait to start my next film! I don't have an idea yet, but I know I'm adding lots of colour and detail. 

YaaHOOOO

I added some extra sound effect and credits. 

Cheatalicious

I flipped shots 01, 02, and 04. They look a bit slanted but at least doughboy's not facing the wrong direction anymore.

(Haha, look how nice that is ^)

The messy credits at the end won't stay that way, and I still need to add a Uarts logo. But for the most part I'm pretty much done. 

"Comes out Fresh" - Quoted by Ben

I'm running out of good titles.

Also, I asked Kyle to take out the wind sound. There's nothing blowing around in the animation so it doesn't make much sense to have it, even though it sounds cool.

Everything's starting to come to a close. Just have that godforsaeken walk cycle to clean up and I'm done. Well almost done. There's still small mess-ups I need to fix (like that shot where he loses his eyebrows, haaaa).

Thinks about the oven too much

The sound has been finalized!!

 Hazaah!!

Before I gave my thumbs up to Kyle, I checked out how it sounded in the theatre, 

AND IT WAS AMAZING!

(thank you kyyyylllleee)

It also looked super sweet too, hoo hoo!

(Also a few new scenes were animated this week, aight aight.)

Enslaves Keebler Elves

Lots of nice cleaned up shots with sound!

The sound's still being worked on but I like the changes a lot. I don't like the "DUN DUN DUN" moment with the sound when we see the hand in the beginning.

I absolutely LOVE the build-up to when the kid goes to pick the flower!

.....

I made a little stand in title.

Weak as Dough

I've been putting off a big research paper all semester to work on my junior piece, so I've taken a break from working on clean-up (though I do have this shot), and have dedicated most of this week to my paper. 

.....

Kyle sent me some sound yesterday.

 It's not what I'm looking for. It sounds "too spooky" to me. 

So I made him a map of the film with commentary of what sounds should be used. 

I'm looking for some more atmospheric/ethereal/horror-ish. 

I also sent him some examples of sounds I like:

Hannibal Theme

Coraline - You Know That I Love You

Suspense Sounds

Curvy, plain, bald

I mean..

Oh! Guess who's done animating?? Hahahaha!!!!

Ha... it's like.. I don't even need to work anymore.

Ugh, but I have to clean-up that walk cycle... that thing has like 60 some frames in it!!! WHY DID I DO THIS TO MYSELF??!! ugh..

Oh well.

I'm going to send this video off to Kyle so he can start putting some sound to it, yuess.

Holly's been working on the title:

We agreed to go with a sharper look to contrast the visual that the word "flower" usually gives a person, which is soft and gentle. 

Since I will be doing clean-ups soon I've been drawing a lot of doughboys..

Yeee

I also checked my colours down in theatre and they look superb!

Umm.. I guess that's it!

Anything rolls with him

I mean, just incase you were wondering about the titles.

...

I don't have too much to show for this week since I doubled my work load last week so I could have a freed up Spring Break.

I asked my friend Holly to help me with the type for my piece. For the credits I'm thinking of something along the lines of how Over the Garden Wall did theirs. Nice and centered. 

And for the title I want something like this:

Holly and I talked about Art Nouveau and old carnival type faces. She's going to find a pre-existing type and tweak it a bit for me.

She sent me these choice types and I circled the things I liked. I still want the F and L to swoop, and I want to keep the goopiness. 

 It took me a while to find the PERFECT shade of red/pink. I settled on a colour that's somewhere between electric crimson and folly. I'm veeeery happy I found this colour :-)

Illiterate Doughboy

So before I left for spring break I checked "Key CheckOut" (my school's way of letting us use certain programs off campus) to see if ToomBoom was one of those programs I needed to sign out before I left for break. ToomBoom wasn't listed so I assumed I'd be able to use it off campus. 

I was wrong.

But it's ok. I got done most of this week's work before break even started, because for once I wanted a normal break!!! art schoool whyyyyyyyyyy!!!

Also. Good news:

I ONLY HAVE FIVE MORE SHOTS TILL I'M DONE ANIMATING!

One of them.. no, two of them are practically stills!

Any ways. Here's what I got.

Timing's a bit off. Needs to hold longer for most shots.

...

I hope you were all able to get your bread and milk before the snow hit!

He's soft, and stupid, and scared.

Yooooo!

I've been punching out shots LIKE A BOSS.

I didn't know I could animate this fast.

I'm literally half way done my animation!

loook at thattt ^^^

I found out how to loop my walk cycle for those four shots too. I didn't bother to add the loop to each shot yet since I don't know whether I can expand and contract the exported file in AE or if I need to expand and contract all the keys themselves in ToonBoom.

Blood is easy. I don't worry about it anymore. I still have to pick out the perfect shade of red/pink. I'm debating on wether or not I should also add highlights and shadows to the blood to make it more goopey. I can definitely lay down flat colours and then experiment on one shot later. 

It's literally all in the guidelines. Make your timing chart and you're set. I find making literal guidelines really helpful. If I have a head turn I'll sometimes draw a guideline for the nose and make etchings where the nose should be for each key, and then all the other body parts just follow suite.

I just really like this shot

THE ALL MIGHTY LOAF

I don't know how, but I'm animating :-V 

This is cool.

LOOPED GIF

...

...

Quuuestions and Reflections:

- How do I loop this animation in After Effects so I can have him walking forever, wherever?

- I'm keeping on top of my production calendar and it seems I've remembered how to animate..

- The only thing I'm not looking forward to is clean-up. But who knows how that will go.

- I'm going to have to figure out ho to do this: 

Like.. should I make a weird shape and just use the pin tool in AE? I need to find out how to... what is it, earthquake effect?? I want an earthquake effect on the animation itself. Mainly the character though, it doesn't need to be on the blood/brain-matter. Maybe I should just draw different scribbles every frame to make it looks like shooting blood/brain-matter. yeaah

HE'S 13

So many flowers.. so many bones. My google history looks a little questionable now with all the skeleton pictures I've been looking up. 

The flowers ended up looking like some kind of cupcake.

Cupcake flowers. Cupcake flours. Doughboy.

I whipped these all out in a day. Except for that long one though. I avoided that one. 

...

I animated some stuff too.

I was really happy with this. Last week I was certain I forgot how to animate and I had one of those fits of doubt. You know those fits that animator's always get themselves into; "Why'd I think I could do this?", "I was not meant to be an animator.", "Maybe illustration would be a better path for me." kind of thing. I spent a night just cringing at the monitor. But then the next day I decided to play dumb and just take everything super slowly. Used some arcs and messed around with timing and spacing. And now I feel good. I'm happy with this. 

...

Oh, and here's a Production Still:

It's going to look like this.

...

I take my job very seriously.

You know what they say about them flurs

I was able to get most of the work I set out to do this week. I had to sacrifice punching out some backgrounds in order to get started on ToonBoom. I like the program so far. I need to learn some hot keys though - probably need to go into settings. I think I need to learn how to animate again too.. haa.