thewellofmanyinks

[thewellofmanyinks]

[thewellofmanyinks]

Specialisms — Illustrator & After Effects Animation

Today in class we passed around the rough thumbnail storyboards we all drafted and then split up to work individually. I started working on some of the assets I will need for my segment of the animation, which I started making in Illustrator. This includes the golden teddy bear, one of the objects the character of the fable will be turning to gold.

I made this asset in Illustrator, so that it fits the style of the rest of the animation and I get some more practice with the software. This asset has a significant amount of detail because I intend to zoom out of it, using it as a transition, hopefully.

[thewellofmanyinks]

Specialisms — Illustrative Animation

Today we had an exercise in animating a humanoid character in After Effects, learning about the use of compositions and the difference between FK and IK. We animated the bear's walk cycle, as well as the follow-through of ears bouncing (and I made the eyes move as well).

I had a bit of a slide on one foot during the actual movement but not the other, because there was a .03 difference in speed between one foot and the other, which is just enough to create a slide for one foot. I don't know how to fix it beyond starting over.

[thewellofmanyinks]

Illustrator - Specialisms

The next specialism we're exploring involves learning Adobe Illustrator to create vector assets that will then be imported to After Effects for animation.

We've been given a color palette limited to five colors, and the prompt "Fable". We have to come up with a script, concept the characters therewithin, and divide the work decided upon by the group by the members to create a ~60-90 second animation.

Not only are we using a new program, writing our own script, and doing our first real collaborative project, we've also got an extremely limited color palette with not a lot of time for concepting.

This has been a little bit of a challenge, mostly the time constraint, though I have a little prior knowledge of Illustrator.

I've never used the program before, but I have watched a course or two about it, and I didn't have much trouble figuring it out. I'm confident in my writing abilities, but my main concern is keeping everything within the time limit, which I think I achieved with my script.

That which I've had to fiddle around most with is the design of the characters. When I first made Midas I was very fresh to the program, but I slowly got bolder with my technique until I had made Dionysus, and the change in style did draw comments from my tutor. I do think it would be good to complexify the designs of (especially Midas) the other characters a bit more so that they don't look so stylistically different. I think they should also have proper hands, like Dionysus.

[thewellofmanyinks]

Unit One - Storyboarding

The first specialism we covered at the beginning of this year is storyboarding.

We got a couple lessons teaching us how to storyboard.

I've never storyboarded before, but I've done one animation. I learned a lot during these lessons.

We started with small post-it notes that we blocked out the basic expressions and shots we had in our minds to fit the script that was half-provided.

Then we moved digital and did a second pass with a little more detail in action. Another pass to add in the followthroughs and tie off hookups. We then did one final peer-review to critique each other and help expound on what we can improve.

One of the things I learned through this a mistake I had made in the beginning of the digital run-throughs: I drew both background and characters on one layer, which made it hard to change.

I also had to get used to the thought of scrapping ideas in lieu of something that works better. I had a segment of the board that switched from on-facing to side-profile, but I redid it to cut out the side-profile to make it flow better and cut out an unnecessary single-use camera.

[thewellofmanyinks]

"Mystery" Project — Flour Sack Animation

This is my finished animation for the 2D flour sack project we have to complete and turn in. I got the concept down pretty quickly, I think it was the fourth idea I brainstormed. Between the concept, background, and cartoony wobbles of the sneaky flour sack, I'm quite happy with it. I had to figure a few things out, like coloring and arranging things to be on or off screen, and importing the background from photoshop to animate, but they all went pretty well. Overall I'm quite proud of this. I had originally intended to add a shadow on the ground matching the flour sack's movements to match up with the light source, but for time's sake, I forsook that in order to make sure my other projects are ready to turn in.

It could be smoother, had I added inbetweens, but I'm quite happy with it as it is. I don't mind the sort of choppiness — it gives it a bit more of a cartoonish, exaggerated feeling, in my opinion.

[thewellofmanyinks]

Maya - Treasure Object Turntable

I can't upload the turntable itself because the file itself is too large, but I just finished getting the turntables for the goblet I made for the king's feast and the chair.

I've also started the reflection paper and did some work on my walk cycle. Almost there... I'm so very tired. I spent a lot of my energy on Maya and the floursack, I hope it was worth it.

I'll get everything done by submission, though I might have to pull some long hours. After getting ill recently, which threw off my eating and sleep schedule, I nearly fell asleep in class and I'm trying not to while writing this. I'll push through until submission.

[thewellofmanyinks]

Maya — The King's Treasure, Modeling + Lighting Project

For this project I have been redoing pretty much the entire room we were given, but I've made a lot of progress. Despite redoing the legs of the table, redecorating the top of the chair and adding a pillow, texturing and resizing the tapestries, enlarging the room, extending the roof, deleting all the provided treasure, and struggling to texture a very stubborn rug, I've been able to make something I'm very proud of: complete with ivory pillars, a fabric hanging, bejeweled goblets (some filled with red wine), plates, a completed rug, and an arched doorway.

I've also been able to set up a three-point lighting system.

This project has so far taken twelve hours. I still plan on adding more treasure: bejeweled bowls, candlesticks, more drapery, maybe even a gold or silver fountain behind the king's chair.

I still find Maya has frustrating as ever, but some parts of this have been fun. Namely the goblets, table legs, and archway (though the goblets are my favorite).

[thewellofmanyinks]

Media Roles in the Industry

Mia, Lou, Will, and I have finished and presented our Media Roles presentation for Cinematography. It was a lot of fun and I'm very proud of what we did. We worked together to keep ourselves on top of our slides, helped each other with research, and worked together to make sure we would speak at a pace that would be understandable but not run over our time. We succeeded at 9,30 minutes, covering "Dialogue," "Voice Acting," "Writers," "New Technology," "Online Culture," "Audience Behavior," and "How Do These Affect the People We’ve Mentioned?" followed by our citations slide, all formatted in harvard citation.

Overall I'm very proud of our presentation and how we pulled it all together, and I am confident in how well we covered the brief and presented our extensive research.

I wrote the "Voice Acting" slide with Lou, and the "Online Culture" slide.

[thewellofmanyinks]

3D Maya Class - Rotary Phone Modeling

The progress of my rotary phone for the 3D class.

I still do not like Maya. It's frustrating and something always goes wrong and I usually have no idea how. Also things keep activating or switching even though I've not pushed any new buttons (or sometimes even any buttons at all). I think perhaps if we were animating pre-built models it would help create an appeal for the program, but my current experiences are putting me off of Maya in general...

It's nice when something turns out well, but it's just so much frustration that I dread opening up the application and postpone the work behind everything else just because I don't want to wrestle with Maya again.

I'm going to model the phone's wire and try to texture both objects (phone and chair) tomorrow.

[thewellofmanyinks]

Cinematography — Film Essay

I have now finished my rough draft of my film language essay. The essay, including the title and in-text citations is 2044 words and currently stands at five pages long. I'm going to send it to some peers to get it reviewed, then come back to it later once I have a pair of fresh eyes to revise and finalize the essay.

[thewellofmanyinks]

Drawing Class - Color Experiment

This was the result of my first attempt at doing this more abstract style of coloring. I've done sketch-pieces before — pieces that have sketchy lines or coloring styles, but I've never done it with this many colors. It's something I've been wanting to do for a few years, and just never really tried. It's not perfect, but I had a lot of fun not caring whether it was perfect or not and just slapping down colors wherever I wanted to, adding bright lines wherever I felt they were needed. Very good exercise to have fun and destress, and a very fun first experience. I'm probably going to end up doing more of these styles of pieces in the future.

[thewellofmanyinks]

Having a go at an animatic. I've still got a long way to go, but I'm very happy with what I've made, so far! The timing has been the hardest part so far, getting all the scenes to match up with the lines.

[thewellofmanyinks]

Drawing Session - Shading Practice

The result of today's drawing session. I didn't necessarily learn any new techniques because because I've done all of them before, but it was good to practice and fun to play with lighting in a fast, loose pace.

I did learn about the quick color-picking method today though, and keyboard shortcuts to auto-fill selections with the foreground color, which I am very thankful for.

The second lighting test is my favorite, but all three were done with different lighting angles, colors for shadow and highlight, and were split between cell shading and gradient shading. The first features cell shading with cyan shadows and yellow highlights. The second features gradient shading with red shadows and light blue highlights. The third is also gradient shading in a night-time or dark setting, with purple shadows and green highlights. The shadows are more subtle than the other two, given how dark the scene already is, and the highlights are more stark as the object of light is much closer to the character.

[thewellofmanyinks]

The rough of Clementine’s walk cycle, the tie down of her walk cycle, and the first lined frame . Next step is linework, followed by color.

This is still my first version of this animation. I spent a few days trying to think about whether I should start over so I don’t have to keep fiddling with small details that were mucking up the animation, but I decided I’d rather stick with it and keep going, which resulted in the second gif being the tie down. There was a lot of fixing to get there. Editing proportions and positions, doing the hat about three times, redoing the skirt, redoing the gun, redoing the spurs.

Lots of back and forth on character design and parts of the walk, and I may still fiddle with it while I add inbetweens and smooth out the animation. So far, I’m very happy with the design and the motion — befitting of a grumpy badass older wild-west bandit-hunting woman.

[thewellofmanyinks]

Coloring Exercise

This is the coloring exercise I did for class. My first palette, a revised one, and a copy of the revised one with colored lineart.

I like both, but the second rendition is a bit better because the colors don’t oppose so drastically, even though the second one also features a warm color vs a cold one. On the third with colored lineart, the lineart needs to be darker. It looks fine in photoshop, but zoomed out in tumblr it’s harder to discern.

[thewellofmanyinks]

I did these exercises which I accidentally deleted / missed now, and have added them to my showreel.