Boy, have the last two weeks been a wild ride. We went from inchworms and walking straight over to multilayer designing. Which is not at all hard to animate, but designing it is another thing entirely. I started in PhotoShop once again, and made my sky a nice light blue with an almost white gradient toward the horizon. I added a sun as well, which I colored pure white and added a nice outer glow. I picked a nice muted green for the ground, and made a hilly foreground layer. I repeated the process two more times, the green getting slightly lighter as it got closer to the sun. After I had my ground and river drawn in, I moved onto foliage. Well, trees. I drew my nice pine tree with the brush tool, using individual strokes for each branch and pine needles. It took 45 minutes. But they look beautiful. Then I just copy pasted them a total of about 120 times, filling out each layer, getting progressively smaller the farther back. I also added Christmas decorations to one single tree at the end. I was done.

With PhotoShop.

Into AfterEffects I went, and I set up the positional key frames I needed for each layer in about 5 minutes. I went to export. That’s where the trouble began. No less than SIX times I exported the clip, and every time I went to open the QuickTime file it said “could not open”. Each rendering takes 15 minutes, and after the first 5 times I realized my resolution was set to 10000 x 1080 pi. So, I bumped it down to a reasonable 1920 x 1080 pi. Guess what, though? It still didn’t work. I gave up, and just had to show it from inside AfterEffects. This is why I don’t have a video.

Still my favorite project so far, though.

Interview of Mario Bustos

Mario Bustos Interview



The Task

In e-Comm we had to film and edit an interview of a person in our group. The most outstanding event that we came up with was Mario Bustos reaching black belt in Taekwondo. I drew out the outline for how we would film, and Lauryn wrote the 22 questions needed. We recorded the intro and outdo in the classroom. Then, we went out to the gym, recorded about 13 minutes off footage, stayed after school to finish asking questions. 

Editing

I headed over to Premiere Pro and started editing. After two days, my files got corrupted. So I started over. I used many different title screens and fades to try and make my video look good. Next time, I'd like to not take this as seriously, and take a more comedic approach. I did learn how to crop and add second media over existing clips, though, which is extremely useful.

Overview

For two weeks, I worked hard on my new project. It was to draw your own character, import it into PhotoShop, clean it up, and then put it into AfterEffects to animate it. This was something new to me - scanning my drawing into a computer file.

PhotoShop

First thing I learned to do was how to scan something using the cool machine in our classroom. After that it was 2 tries of trying to import that fresh PNG file into PhotoShop, which I realized on my second try that the reason it looked so blurry was because I was on a quarter view. Yeah. After that hiccup I was back to stuff I already knew how to do: using the paint bucket, wand tool, brush, etc. from my time in Microsoft Paint.

AfterEffects

After about 4 days of polishing my character, who I based off of Sackboy from LittleBigPlanet, I imported him into AfterEffects. Oh. Ohoho. I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out why he was importing so blurry, until I asked my teacher for help and he pointed out that I was on a quarter view. Again. After THAT hiccup I was again back to what I knew how to do: using rotation, anchor points, and position to make Sackboy walk across my screen. When I first used the null object tool to move him across the screen, I managed to make his footsteps line up perfectly with his walking speed on the first try. He started in the middle of the screen, though, but I was too scared of messing up my accomplishment, so I just made him fall from the sky to let him land in the same place.

That was something I could have definitely done better, along with a background that was actually made by myself. I do think I did well on actually drawing my character, though. We're gonna be starting a new project very soon actually, and I can't wait to see what it is.