Wiggly Worm

Overview

Once more, a daunting task was assigned. Last week I finished my bouncing ball. This week, I finished my inchworm animation. As you can hopefully see, I have gotten better at Photoshop. We made the tube shape of the worm on PS, along with our background layers, and imported everything into After Effects. 

Learned

From there, we used a new tool - the Puppet Pin. I messed around a bit with it, tried to use the starch tool, failed at it. Solved the problem by just adjusting the pins instead. After making the worm arch its back a sufficient number of times, I headed on over to the Null tool. That was new. I learned how to move the worm according to the pushes of its body, and after 2 hours I finished the animation completely.

This has been my favorite project I've done in Animation so far (including last year), and this week we'll start working on a walking animation. Should turn out to be quite the challenge.

Jumping Ball

The Task

Like last year, our first task in animation was a bouncing ball. Except instead of only using Photoshop, though, we also got to try out Adobe After Effects for the first time. But, we did pay attention to detail a lot more.

Overview

Instead of having to make 40+ layers for a 3 second animation, we instead made one separate ball layer in PS. Then in After Effects, we used movement keyframes to animate it. I have a pretty basic understanding now on how to squash and stretch using AE, but I still need to work on the whole speed thing.

Animation

It took me quite a while to get all way to animating. But when I did, I almost wished I hadn't. I had to fiddle around with all the different key frames and arcs and stuff like that, but when I finally got my ball's path plotted out, I had to figure out squashing. Then stretching and rotation. I'm still not too happy with it, though, mostly because I couldn't figure out a way to manually adjust the easing of the ball myself.

Procedure Video

ONW Procedure Video

Our first video project was a simple one designed to let us take the new video cameras for a test drive. Mine turned out awful. Three months out of practice, I was unable to spit out something I'm proud of. We decided to show the students how to be the best Raven ever.

We came up with a list of FIVE need-to-know items about ONW:

Secret shortcuts between hallways

Bathroom that almost no one uses

Out of the way staircases

The auditorium

Special drinking fountains for bottles

We didn't really storyboard at all, besides listing those five musicians-haves on paper. I was the camera man, though, and we managed to get a hold of the school mascot hat. We filmed all of our scenes in the span of 80 minutes, ending up with about 5 minutes of footage. Unfortunately, we got hit with the 30 seconds-only rule. So we lost over half of our clips.

We edited our own clips, and mine turned out alright, I guess. I definitely could have done better if there wasn't a time restriction. I would've made better transitions, an easier to follow flow, and actual audio. I did like all of the shots we got, though, so I'd keep those. 

Honestly, for the next project, I hope we get to pick our groups. I feel I could do a lot more with people I've worked with extensively before.