Week 3

Our lessons this week were dedicated to finishing our concept pitch and then presenting it on Wednesday morning. Some of the presentations and concept ideas were fantastic (my favourites were iPilot and Lights) but in the end only 11 concepts were chosen and my concept (Billy and the Sock Puppet) was one of them!! :D
Initially I was going to work on another animation (iPilot), but ultimately I decided that I wanted to see my own animation through to the end so I chose to go solo and animate Billy and the Sock Puppet on my own!

Week 2

This week we learnt how to create a human walk cycle in Adobe Flash.
Here's a basic idea of what we did (I'll go into more detail below)

The picture above shows the different 'poses' that make up a human walk cycle. They are; contact, down, passing, up, and contact again to repeat the cycle - ours was created within a thirteen frame time span (contact on frame 1, down on frame 4, passing on frame 7, up on frame 10, and contact again on frame 13).

*Note: The picture above is spaced out in order to show the different poses more clearly, when actually animating our walk cycle it looked more like the image below (when onion skin was on, of course :P)

In the end we only had to animate one walk cycle - we copied and pasted all of the animated frames, and then moved them into the correct position using the Edit Multiple Frames tool. This allowed my little stick man to walk all the way across the stage (for 75 frames) without me having to animate any more than the 13 frames it took to initially create the walk cycle.

We also learnt just how important the positioning of the arms in a walk cycle is! It gives the character movement and consequently makes the animation look more realistic. While animating our characters arms we learnt that when the right foot is forward, the right should be back, and vice versa (this keeps the character balanced). Additionally, we learnt about the two most exaggerated arm positions in the walk cycle - they are in the 'down' pose and the passing 'pose'. The down frame is the frame where the character impacts the ground and is the lowest point in the cycle, hence the characters arms are furthest from the body as a result of the force of hitting the ground; and in the passing frame the arms should be straight down by the characters side with no movement whatsoever.

Page 102 - 215 in the Animator's Survival Kit was very helpful - good as a visual reference for various types of walks, etc.

Top things to remember from this week

• To avoid foot sliding issues you must ensure that the heel of the front foot always line up between the contact, down and passing positions, and the toe of the back foot line up between the passing, up, and contact positions
• Counterpose - when animating arms in a human walk cycle always remember that when the right foot is forward, the right arm is back, and vice versa
• Inbetweeners - they are people hired by animation companies whose sole purpose is to animate the blank frames in between the main frames...how exciting! :P
• By using the Edit Multiple Frames tool you can shift/edit multiple frames at once (that will DEFINITELY come in handy)
• If you're going to copy and paste your walk cycle MAKE SURE that the two contact frames are the same, otherwise it looks crazy
• The head and body must not stay level during the walk cycle - the ups and downs are exaggerated to convey weight (and the shift of that weight)
• The onion skin tool is my new best friend! :P
  
  

Concept Pitch

I've been giving some more thought to my concept pitch and I've come up with a new idea! (I already had a few ideas but they were either too crappy, or would be too hard to animate - especially in the limited time we have for that part of the assignment). Anyway, as I was saying, I have a new idea for my concept pitch - a boy who gets eaten by his sock puppet. After being eaten by his sock puppet, the boy goes on a crazy adventure (kind of Alice in Wonderland-esque) and ends up trapped in his own head...literally! I'm sure that doesn't make much sense (actually, I know it doesn't make ANY sense :P) but the idea/imagery in my head is pretty cool, so now I just have to work on my pitch so I can convince everyone else that it's a cool idea for a short animation.

Week 1

The first weeks tutorials focussed on getting us acquainted with the basics of 2D flash animation in Adobe Flash. The program is completely new to me, however after playing around with it for a couple of hours I am pretty confident that it will be (reasonably) easy to get the hang of to be able to make a semi decent animation with.

Top things I remember from this week (not including the really basic stuff that we all remember :P)

• Whenever creating a new project make sure the dimensions are 1024 x 576, and the fps is set to 25
• Make sure all symbols are graphic (instead of movie clip, etc)
• How to use the tween function! (awesome little tool)
• Creating a guide line (using the pen tool) in order to move objects across the stage via a set path
• Using the onion skin tool to view movement in mulitple frames
• Tween 'ease in/ease out' tool - we used it to make our bouncing ball animation more realistic by making it appear as if the 2D ball has a real sense of weight and force acting upon it (a real ball would slow down when entering the 'arc' and speed up when coming out of the 'arc' due to friction and gravity, and by using the tween 'ease in/out' tool we can better replicate such movement in our animations)
• There are more, but I have forgotten :P (I'll add them when I use Flash again - that'll jog my memory!)

*An example of the animation we created in the tutorial


Our first lecture was equally as interesting as the tutorials - Brodie McCrossin from The People's Republic of Animation was our guest speaker and he showed us some amazing short animations created by students and professionals.
This is The People's Republic of Animation website > http://thepra.com.au
Go there...Now! :P (After the lecture I went home and watched the Cat Piano, amongst other animations by them, and it was really interesting so I highly recommend watching some of their animations).

I've also been giving some serious thought to my concept for my short animation - I've come up with a few ideas but it's quite hard to confine these ideas to two minutes :S...although, when it comes to actually animating the short story I'll probably be very thankful that we only have to animate two minutes :P