ocean waves

I've changed the movement of the waves, I'm happier with them because it now looks like the ship is moving forward, but still I'm not too keen on it. They could maybe be slower, but I think it does add some kind of movements that makes the whole thing work, I'm just not 100% happy with it. I might come back to it, when I've finished and try to make it better.

For some frames I could copy and paste the character which made things slightly easier for me, I now need to add some blinking to the character so that he doesn't look like some kind of robot and also finish drawing in his hair and shoulders.

scene 5 - paper areoplane

This is what I've done so far in this scene, I do think the head movement could be more fluent but then I am working in 12 fps so it's not going to be flowing perfectly. Another think I'm not happy with is the waves, I think either the waves need to move slower or have the horizon waves move also. I'll first of all so how the animation looks when I slow down the wave movement, and if I'm still not happy, add some movement along the horizon too.

Travel speed

I had created my paper aeroplane traveling from left to right, but when I played it it was too slow to go with the characters head that would be turning his head to look at the plane. I got rid of some frames to speed it up and spaced them out so that the speed would be constant, I now just need to add in my background and character.  

Exporting fixed

I was having trouble with exporting, it would only play for a second or so and cut off the last few frames in the animation. 

I contacted my tutor who helped me get the right frame rate, I followed these steps he sent me and my animation now plays fine. 

Paper plane test

Gifs work

After trying out things, I figured, I'll get my frames done and try and export it right when I can get help. I've managed to save it as a gif and it lasts the correct amount of time.

Back to the original storyboard

Animation story board

I started another animation, I'm confident will be easier for me to animate. And yes I've already found it easier, but I still have the same problem with exporting. For some reason when I export, it's missing off the end frames, causing the animation to be shorter. When ever I export an animation no matter how many frames, it's limit is 1 second, and I don't know how to change this.

Screen recording

exported

Not getting anywhere

I've done 48 frames in Photoshop layers, when I play it back it all looks fine but when I open it in Premier to check to see if it fits with the audio, it plays too fast and only last a second or so. The frame rate is definitely 12fps in Premier, and I can't seem to check the frame rate in Photoshop. 

I'm finding it difficult to move on because I can't figure out where I've gone wrong, and don't fancy starting it all again following a tutorial for guidance. 

This is how it's looking at the moment, the audio doesn't match up, it's not got a lot of qualities to it, and I'm just not happy with anything about it right now.

Starting my animation

I've started my animation with simple character design and plan to use the simplest of movements because this is my first time animating digitally using photoshop, so I know it's not going to be the best piece of animation I can do.

In the first video, the mouth movement is too fast so I needed to slow that down, also make the character look less like a robot and make him blink.

I first of all focused on the mouth shapes of the character that are speaking and added arm movements to emphasise the expression. I wan't happy with the way it turned out and decided I needed more facial movement so, I made my character blink and I've animated the eyebrows to emphasise this. 

Fire design

Visual language comments

These are the comments I received from peers when we looked at each others work. 

The main comments was that there could be more colour in my drawing, which yeah would make them look more appealing.  

Also more media could have been used, I thought I did use a range of media to find one i liked working in, but I suppose there are more materials I could have used for a wider use of media. 

Overall I received good comments, but from looking at others sketchbooks, I could have done more drawings of different perspectives (of the same object) and used more colour and media when doing my 8 drawings. 

12 image sequence

My 12 image sequence tells the story of a girl writing a letter, folding it into a paper aeroplane and flying it across the world to a boy who is away on ship. 

I had this story idea for the elements project, but decided not to use it, so when I picked the paper plane image to do my 12 image sequence I thought, why not use this story because I do really like it. I tweaked bits from the original story and did a refined storyboard in pen,  because I thought this was the most clear media to get the story across to the audience. 

Character design

Character influences and designs

Rooster Teeth

Netty Scribble

Tim Burton

I picked the animations that have this kind of style of animation because, I like the line quality, the simplicity of the drawing and because in some ways, they are similar to my style of drawing. The limbs of my characters are just lines really, in a way similar to Tim Burton, with his tall and slim characters and similar to Rooster Teeth's character's arms. 

So the style I have gone for is simple and I need to now consider whether the whole animation will be black and white or have a limited colour pallet. I think it will need some colour, I could maybe draw in a different colour than black and use different tones to add shading, like Rooster Teeth have, or use block colour for the character's faces, hair and t-shirts, so that they are the main focus of the animation.  

Chris Of The Dead - Minecraft Minimations

Here's an example of how I'm not going to animate for this project, it's way too advanced for me; but looking at the camera shots and the environmental design, the shots don't change to close ups or anything, they're mostly wide shots and the characters don't move around as much, they just kind of stay centre. I like that it's all very well done with the 3d characters and everything, but again, I was looking at the simplicity of the camera angles and how it was animated along with the audio.    

Phineas and Ferb

One thing I like about Phineas and Ferb, is that the head only really has two view points, the characters are either stood facing left or right and the head changes direction when they do. I don't think I've ever really seen them face forward for a long period of time they are always stood as they are above.

It's the same with the other two animations I've blogged about, the head doesn't move a lot, it's mainly just the expression that changes. You don't see the characters turn their heads from left to right, it's they're looking left, now right. And I'm going to use this style in my animation, because I think it goes with the fast paced audio.   

Scribble Netty

Scribble Netty creates animations from gameplay audio, I like this style because even though the characters are quite detailed, she doesn't have the characters prancing about a lot as the shots change quickly to be in time with the audio. Similar to the Animated Adventures, the majority of movements comes from the mouth and arms/hands. 

I'll use this to help me with animating with a fast paces audio and also look at how the characters are framed and how they move if they are coming into the scene. 

I also like the sketchy kind of style she has going on, I like the fact that the lines aren't all neat, it gives it more character.     

Rooster Teeth - Animated adventures

I like these Animated Adventures because, they animate audio taken from a podcast and while the speech is pretty funny on it's own, animating it gives the audience a visual which adds more humour. These newer episodes in the series, have more colour and are more detailed than previous episodes, I prefer the earlier episodes because of the simplicity of the style and colours 

An earlier video of the series has limited colours and a very simple style, this is a look I want to go with, but I don't want it to be too similar because, the audio I have from the Minecraft gameplay is from the same company, so I don't want it to seem like I'm copying them. I'm going to look at other animations to try and create a style that is different.