The finished product

I am now 100% complete with my animation. After exporting I brought the animation into after effects. I added a beam of light to put in with the space scene with the alien. I was able to put a glow effect on it that looked nice. I also added titles to the beginning of the animation and I added credits to the end. Next I brought the file into premiere and I added my sounds. I added sound effects throughout the animation as well as music to play during the credits. I exported through premiere and the finished product came out in good quality.

Tweaking the Project

At this point I am now done with the animation. I am now going back into each scene and fixing timing, adding secondary motion, and anything else that needs to be added. I went back into all of my figure animations and added movement into my characters hair. This seems to add a little more movement into the character and it looks good. I also added some clouds to the scenes that I hadn't put them into yet. I finally drew the bird to put into the one sky scene and animated its wings and eye with a motion clip and set it to move on a guided path. I am ready to export and bring it to after effects and premiere to add titles and sound.

Finishing up

For the remainder of my scenes my character has a similar series of animating. He is flailing his arms and legs while his is flying through the sky and while he is floating in space. I created a frame by frame animation and used my illustrator document of my figure in order to maneuver all the shapes that make up the character. I also animated my figure while his is riding a rocket ship into space. Since he is not moving too much i animated his mouth and his hair to move as if the wind is blowing it back. My animation is basically complete and now I will go back a fix a few things.

More Animating

My next task was to finish my last scene. I am animating my scenes out of order so I am doing the last scene currently. I added secondary motion to the last scene by making another mask of a night scene outside the window, I made the character look like it was breathing while he slept, and I also added a lamp that flickers. After I finished the last scene I started on another animation of my character while it falls and bounces off a trampoline. I first made the character look as if he was sitting as he fell and after he bounces, I have his legs straighten out as he flies off the stage. This scene took a little longer to position because I needed the character to come in and out of the scene and the bounce needed to get far enough down in order to hit the trampoline.

Small Problems

I had started to run into small animation problems while I was working. After rewatching my first scene I realized that my movie clip of my character riding the skateboard had a really weird skip towards the end. I went back into my movie clip and had to re work it and fix the frames in order for it to not skip. I decided to duplicate the frames so that all of the movements would be the same. I also created a separate symbol for when the character is on the skateboard in order for him not to move when he is not supposed to.

Masking

For my last scene I want to use a mask. The mask reveals that my character is in face sleeping and the whole thing was a dream. The mask changes shape and as it become smaller and smaller is is in the shape of a thought cloud. I have never used one before, so I hit a few complications. After working through it a lot I finally figured out the order that the layers needed to be in and that they needed to be locked in order for the to work. After figuring it all out I just fixed the timing of how fast the cloud would form around the scene. I also changed the position and size of the rest of the symbols that are within the mask in order for it to fit in a way that made sense.

beginning my final

I did a good portion of the first scene so far. I am just working out the animation of my character riding his skateboard. It looks pretty good so far. I had made my character model sheets in illustrator and then brought those into flash which is making it easy to animate them since all of the parts of the body are separate objects and I can move all of the points individually. I think for the rest of my final, I am going to approach it by setting up all of the scenes first and then go back and do the animation of my character. I think it will be easier for me to visualize the scenes better if I have a rough cut of all the scenes first.

Final Animation-Storyboards

For my final Animation I decided to animate a series of things happening to my character which would be a skateboarder. First it starts with the boy skateboarding down the street. The next scene is a close up of the skateboard rolling fast down the street, and then it hits a rock and you see the board go flying out of the scene. The next scene is the character flying across the sky leading into the next scene where the character bounces off a trampoline. The character is then flies up in the sky and is flailing around in the clouds as a bird flies over to the character and looks shocked that there is a person in the sky. In the next scene the character grabs hold of a rocket ship which brings him up to space. In space he lets go of the rocket ship and is floating around as there is a planet and shooting stars. In the next scene an alien comes and sees the character and the alien shoots a beam of light at the character which makes him fall down through the previous scenes. As he is falling a cloud like form comes around him and reveals a bedroom in which the character is actually sleeping and you realize it was all a dream.

3rd and 4th scenes

I really took advantage of using multiple scenes in my animation. I had 4 different scenes and each one I tried to use a new camera angle to really explore different ways to make the scene. For my third scene I made an aerial view. I drew a bat using graphics and movie clips and I set it to tween on a path across the scene. I also added leaves set to a guide to add some more movement to the scene since both the character and the background were staying still during this scene. In my last scene I zoomed in very close to a front view of my character and moved the camera from the feet all the way to the head.

Fixing my character

Since I decided to go with a headless horseman/sleepy hollow type theme, I took my old character and made some changes to it. I erased the head and also added a cape. I went into the walk cycle and added the cape in a new layer in order for it to move with the character. On every keyframe where there was a change in the walk cycle I added a new keyframe to the cape. I drew each cape in a different form at each keyframe to make it look like it was flowing as the character walked through the scene. I also added another layer to add color to the character.

Continuing animation 2

While working on my animation I tried to use some of the things that we learned in class. I really wanted to try and use the parallax illusion when I zoomed in my scene. I made the hills in the background more transparent which made them a little darker than the hills in the middle ground. I also finally fixed the walk cycle and the still walk cycle. Lining up the character was giving me a lot of trouble for some reason. I tried using the info box to line them up with the x and y coordinates which helped a little.

2nd Animation

In starting my 2nd animation I am trying to fix all of the little things that were causing my problems in my first animation. My walk cycle still was not running perfectly smooth. I figured out that the back foot of my character was actually moving backward in one frame which caused it to skip and look like his foot wasn't moving forward. After fixing that it looked much better. I was also having trouble with the still cycle because of that same reason. I thought I had fixed it but it still looked weird, so then i figured out it was half still but then it took one step. I used a ruler to line up the middle of the body on all of the frames in order to keep the character in one position. My plans for my animation include my headless horseman character walking through the forest. Then the scene will change and the camera will pan into the forest where it will become more dense with trees. He will find a pumpkin there that he will plan on using for a head. The scene and camera angle will change again to a birds eye view as a bat picks up the pumpkin and drops it on his head.

Onion skinning

I just animated my first walk cycle. It was only one second and i used onion skinning while drawing the different positions in the walk cycle. I quickly realized that I didn't know how to walk and therefore was having a difficult time animating. I ended up getting up and simulating walking at a very slow pace in order to really understand each movement that happens when you take one step. I think the animation gets better with each frame, but it definitely needs a lot more work. I ended up adding color to it as well because after testing out the three different ways to color my figure, I was curious on how the color would add to the energy of my character. I liked the way it looked, but my only criticism is that I think I need to make the figure travel a shorter distance because it is moving too fast.

Starting the walk cycle

Since we are going to start making a walk cycle I first made a figure that looks as though it is stopped in motion. I chose just to make that action walking, just to start out and get my bearings while using the pencil tool and also using the tablet and pen. I just was going to start by making a very sketchy looking form and then was planning on using that as a template for a more clean, human like form. While in this process, I actually decided that I liked the energy that this little sketch figure possessed. Now it came time to add color. Since I had this non traditional sketch form, I had to think of how I could add color to it. The first thing I did was use different colored pencils to represent each part of the body. Flesh colored for the face and arms, and different colors for the clothing. I really started to like how this was coming out. The next thing i did was to take the paint bucket and just  fill in whatever  it let me with the colors in their respected areas. This gave a really interesting look to the figure. The last way I colored was to use the paintbrush tool set to 'paint behind' and painted the figure with its respected color. By using the paint behind, however, it allowed the black sketch outlines to be on top of the color which I ended up really liking. I really enjoyed trying to come up with different processes to color the figure and the different feel it gave which each change.

First Day

This is my first post in my blog for Digital Animation 1!