Hey guys. I'm finally in class 6 at AM and am really excited to get back into animating. I will be posting an updated version of my short at least every three weeks. We spend a week on each third of our short so every three weeks I'll have another pass of animation on the entire project. If I get a lot of responses, I'll update the file every week. Anyway, please feel free to have a look and tear my work apart. Right now its in the rough blocking stage. This week I'll be bringing the first third into blocking plus. The 2d monster will also be brought into 3d as soon as the new rig for him is ready. Until then I'm going to continue to break down his actions in 2d rather than not working on him at all, lol.
http://studentpages.scad.edu/~jcofer20/shortRoughBlockingSound.mov
Oh, I am having an issue with the soundtrack. I put it together in Premiere and saved the music/sound effects separately since it always give me an error when I try to export the entire video. Everything plays properly and is in sync in Premiere. When I put everything together in Quicktime Twitch's first growls come in late. I have no clue why that's happening since it doesn't do that in Premiere. I have the audio starting at the same time as the video so that shouldn't even occur. It's even stranger because none of the other sound effects are off. I guess you guys could just try to ignore that part for now.
Thanks guys!
"Animation isn't about how well you draw, but how much to believe." -Glen Keane
Super, Joycelyn. Wonderful.
It is so great to witness your work progress that you've shared form the beginning. See ya in the movies.
I agree it's going to be great to watch this progress. I want to see what Growly is going to end up looking like. I didn't seem to have any delay with the sound when I watched it.
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.
Hey guys! Thanks for taking a look at my short so far! Sorry about the last response. I hit "subcribe to this thread" when I first started it and I hadn't recieved any emails saying people responded. I'm glad I decided to stop by and check to make sure, lol.
Thanks for the compliment Wontobe! I'm not very good at making up funny stories, so I decided to make something cute. I always wanted to animate small creatures/monsters so I'm really excited about this project. :D
Hey Graphiteman, I hope you're right about seeing me in the movies, lol. Thats where I've been trying to end up from the very start! Thanks for following my progress. :D
Hey there Phacker, I figured out what was causing the delay in the sound. I had put shots 2 and 3 together in the wrong order. I felt so dumb for doing that, lol. It's fixed now. Twitch is coming along nicely now that I have a TD at Laika helping me. I got the first version of the rig a few days ago and its really great! The only bad thing is everything is ik. I dont know how to use ik spines and I've only used ik arms whenever the hands need to stay locked to something. Version 2 will have an fk spine and fk arms as well and will be ready something this weekend though. I spent some time trying to figure out how to use Twitch's ik spine and I think I have a better idea of the concept behind it. I've decided to hold off on actually using him though until the fk version is ready. I would have to redo the shots anyway since I'm much more comfortable with fk arms/pines anyway. Instead I've just broken down the blocking for the 2d Twitch.
I'll post an update sometime on Sunday. :D
"Animation isn't about how well you draw, but how much to believe." -Glen Keane
Hey everyone,
Here's an up-date. Last week we started the blocking plus stage so here's my blocking plus for the first third of my short:
http://studentpages.scad.edu/~jcofer20/week4.mov
Sorry about the lack of ease in/out. I ran out of time to add that part last week. It will definitely be there the next time I visit that part of my short though. All comments and critiques are greatly appreciated!
Oh yeah, there isn't any sound for this update. I leave adjusting the soundtrack for after I've completed the current stage for all of my shots. I already know that I'm going to have to reedit Twitch's growling effects for shot 3 since he pauses now.
"Animation isn't about how well you draw, but how much to believe." -Glen Keane
Hey guys,
Here's my whole short in the blocking plus stage. I'm not proud of it at all. I lost way too many days of work over the last three weeks and haven't been able to get my short to the point I wanted it to be for this stage. I like shot 13 and 16, I feel like I finally remembered how to animate when I worked on those. I just wish I had enough time to make all of the other shots like that.
There isn't any sound this time. Some of the shots have gotten longer and require me to rearrange the sound effects and music again. I don't have hours to spend doing that for the third time, so I just skipped it. I'm going to leave the sound alone until the very end. I have way too many shots(mainly shot 15 >_<) to catch up on to spend time messing around with other aspects of the short.
http://studentpages.scad.edu/~jcofer20/wholeShortBlockingPlus.mov
"Animation isn't about how well you draw, but how much to believe." -Glen Keane
Very cute concept. Once finished you will have a great clip to show off.
Wow, that's a long short Joycelyn. Are you going to have enough time to finish the whole thing in the next few weeks?
It's looking good so far. I understand most of it's still in blocking mode. There are a few parts that I don't feel is working. In shot 8 around frame 725, the girl's "follow me" arm wave isn't quite reading. I think her hand should come around in a more up and over motion instead of the side swat type of motion. Also the action can be slowed down a bit. Her head and upper torso should also lead this action and move in a similar direction. As it is now her hand moves in one direction and her head/torso moves in the opposite direction. This is confusing the direction she wants to move.
Shot 11 is a little confusing to me. At first I thought they were looking through a window, then I realized it was a mirror later on. You might want to change the angle or something so you can also see the real girl and monster looking into the mirror. But then that's also twice the amount of work.
Looks really good so far. I can't wait to see it all finished.
Aloha,
the Ape
...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."
Hey AnimatedApe,
Thanks a bunch for the critique! Lol, my short keeps getting longer and longer as I work on it. By the end of class 5 my mentor and I got it down to 43 seconds but now it's about a minute and six seconds. >_< I haven't added more shots or anything. I guess all of the acting choices I come up with end up being longer than what had originally. I'm doing the six month program though, so I should be ok. :o
Anyway, thanks a bunch for the critique! Shots 8 and 11 are part of the second third, so I'll fix the things you pointed out next week. That mirror shot is causing a bunch of trouble for me. Some people read it as a mirror and some don't. My mentor and I talked about ways to fix this last week. He suggested animating the character in the mirror, rendering it and applying that to the mirror as a texture. Then he said I can move the characters to the forground so we can see a bit of their heads or something. I tried to do this by actually animating them based off of their reflections but it was working out. Bishop's body wouldn't show up in the reflection and I couldn't get him close enough to the mirror to be in his proper position without his big head blocking everything. I'm glad my mentor thought of the alternative, lol. He said it would be easier to do it that way than to try to animate actual reflections. It's still more work than I thought it was be back in the concept stage though. >_<
I thought about adding a soap holder and a tooth brush holder to the wall to help show that it was a mirror. The soap dish is in place but I couldn't find any free toothbrush or toothbrush holder models. I didn't want to take precious time away from animating to try to model those two things so I'm just going without them. Do you think having those two things would help show that they're in the bathroom looking in a mirror? I also thought of adding a tile texture to the wall around the mirror. Please let me know what you think, because if that is enough to sell the idea, it will save me a lot of work later on, lol.
Thanks again! :D
"Animation isn't about how well you draw, but how much to believe." -Glen Keane