Story Animation

My story animation’s plot has to do with a bird. The bird is flying minding his own business, when suddenly a storm appears and he’s forced to perform evasive maneuvers. After a couple seconds of flying he gets struck by lightning. Just kidding it misses and he actually survives. That’s about it.

This was the most complicated animation I’ve ever done, because I had to use all I learned this past quarter and a half. We used position frames, multiplane techniques, and arc tools to make it happen, as well as opacity keyframes to switch between scenes. After many grueling hours, I managed to finish it. Here’s the finished product:

Essentials For Features

A good feature story needs expert use of the six shot system, using the power points. Strong audio leveled out through the whole video. The most important part is a good interviewee. If the story OR the person is boring, the whole thing is kinda kaput. An interesting delayed lead is essential, as it's the hook to capture your audience's attention.

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.

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.