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.