Other Flash frustrations

Just to note a couple of frustrations and things I learnt with Flash too.

There's a part at the start of my animation where I wanted to get the arm moving from one position to the next a lot better so I broke it down in the nest but then it won't play in the parent level. I keep changing the single frame number to the one it should be but then it just converts straight back to 1 and I've tried everything to fix this but it just won't work. And I have to do the breakdown in the nest because it's just moving the forearm around, not the whole thing. =S

Also I nested my arms inside the body comp but it would be a lot better to put it outside with the head and body, or maybe just to break the top arm and forearm apart. I'm not sure. I just had trouble with the back arm because sometimes I wanted the arm to go behind the body and other times in front of the body so I don't know if you need two different arms on different layers and then just replace it as needed or whether to redraw the arm or what? So this is problem that would need to be addressed if I do a Flash character animation again.

That's my only frustrations that I could think of right now. =)

Animating in Flash =S

I just spent about 5 hours doing a 4 second animation in Flash. Haha. Half of that time was spent actually figuring out how to do it! I thought that it would be very easy but because the character is nested you have to keep making sure that you have 'single frame' selected in properties with the right frame number otherwise you do all this animation and can't see it in the main timeline or it just keeps looping and going haywire. It took me a while to figure this out. So in conclusion, I learnt a lot tonight!

I'm kind of happy with my animation. I think it's cute and she seems alive but it is a little jolty because I couldn't do motion tween with all the parts because my character isn't designed well enough for the motion tween to work properly all the time and it's a bit late to go back and fix her. I've learnt a lot now about things that you need to think about when designing a character for animating and even though Flash can be a bit frustrating and hard to deal with it would be good to learn more about designing good characters for animating and seeing if I can animate it better.

The lip sync and eyes were the easiest parts to animate while the arms were probably the most difficult, especially going from one gesture to another smoothly.

So now all I have to do is make sure I've done everything we need to do and do a bit more tweaking to my animatic/animation. =)

Flash time!

Now it's time for Flash. =D

A few weeks ago I created my characters and did a turn around and then I broke down my main character, the young girl, so that she is ready for animation. I didn't really have much problems with this part of the assignment, apart from the fact that I spent ages trying to figure out what the best way is to draw them into Flash. I also did different mouth shapes and eye shapes so that she was ready to animate.

The next step was creating a proper storyboard (I had my rough ideas down but just had to flesh it out more and get more exact about how my animatic will flow).

I read this great book on Flash animating which has given me more of a scope on things you can do when animating in Flash and it was also great for drawing your characters in Flash. Unfortunately I read this after I designed my characters so I was thinking that I might use Flash for the next assignment so I can experiment with a different style/look and feel using tips from the book (especially using different lines as my design for this piece has no outlines). It's called 'Flash Cartoon Animation' and is written by Kevin Peaty and Glenn Kirkpatrick.

Last week I made my background with multiple layers so that I was ready to do a pan where the levels moved at different times to give more depth. It didn't take me as long as I expected and the thing I mostly had problems with was getting the colours to work together. I think in the future it will be better to spend a few hours before doing colour palettes to create a colour palette for the character and background so that I can then just go and fill it all in. I did the colour for my character first and then had to match the background colours to the characters and although it works now it could probably work better if I planned it all out before I started. Just a thought. =)

So after I did the background I then moved on to doing my pan. It didn't take long at all. I do a pan across the background and then zoom out to see more of it. It was really cool seeing it come to life and seeing how easily your canvas is used as a camera but also how much you'd have to plan your background if you want to do something more complicated.

Today I worked on easing in and out of the movements of the camera. At first I tried to create keyframes on my timeline and do it that way but it's very hard to make it flow and not jolt around. So I decided to use the ease in/out in properties instead and it worked much better. You can bring up a graph so that you can change the pace of the movements by adding points on a graph. It took me a while to figure it out and it still needs a bit of work but it works much more smoothly for creating ease in and outs than adding keyframes and moving your background around physically.

So now I just have to fix the ease in and out as best I can and then do my sound and a little bit of animation.

I'm really enjoying Flash. It's really challenging because you're restricted in some ways but then you can also easily be more creative more quickly. I'd really like to continue to learn how to animate really well in this program and how to make really awesome characters that you can animate without it looking too much like cut out. That's the plan.

Ok on to more Flash now!

Peace out

And it is complete

Wow...and so the craziness of this experimental animation has finally come to an end.

I'm not sure if I like it or not! I've watched it so many times. I ended up redo-ing the choruses and it's alright but I wish I'd had time to think of something better to do in that part. I'm really happy with the animation I did for the verses though. I think that's why I don't know if I like it, because some parts I love and other parts I hate so as a whole it doesn't seem that great...but then again...maybe I've just watched it too many times.

I've learnt a lot and I think I experimented quite extensively with different materials so I'm happy with that. The quality of the animation when it's bigger isn't that great which I'm unhappy about but it's not something I can change now. It probably would've been better to use a digital camera rather than the little video camera I used, I'm sure that would make a big difference to the quality of the images.

So I guess now it's time to clean up my stop-mo station and try and get all the coffee out of the carpet. Haha. Fun fun.

Almost finished

And so I'm almost finished with my animation. I finished the 3rd verse the week before last and tonight just worked on the chorus. It went pretty quick because I experimented with painting/drawing with liquid coffee on cling wrap on the wooden board. I still wanted to keep the wooden board look and not go to paper but putting liquid coffee on the wooden board makes it soak in! I didn't pull the cling wrap tight so it has a cool ripple texture and with the coffee running over it it makes interesting shapes and movements.

I'm not sure if I like what I did tonight at all. It is supposed to be random and doesn't need to make sense like the verses. The lyrics of the chorus is "tell me, tell me, what do you see" so the idea is that random shapes and directions are being drawn and people can make up their own minds about what they see, and this reflects the fact that everyone has different views and opinions on things...no one sees the same thing.

I'm not sure if this part is too random and abstract and maybe too fast? I might ask for some opinions. It does make a good contrast to the verses though, and probably lets the audience trance a bit looking at the random movements and then switching to something that makes more sense.

Almost finished. The end is in sight. =)

Peace out

Second verse done!

Wow...what a night.

Tonight was definitely not my night for animating but I got there in the end...after about 5 hours of animating.

The program I'm using has been really temperamental. It was absolutely fine the last time I used it but tonight it decided to hate me by just quitting unexpectedly all the time...like every few minutes. At first it was great...I spent about 20minutes doing a second of animation and forgot to save it and it decided to play the quitting game...maybe it just hated what I was doing and was trying to tell me to start again and do a better job...I don't know...but I surely didn't appreciate it because it meant that I had to clear my chopping board of coffee grains and start again.

And so I slugged along for the first hour or so just to get something done and then decided to turn the computer off and give it a rest and it worked...but I still saved after about every frame after that, just in case! That's the hard thing about stop-mo animating...if something happens like you lose the last 10 frames you did...you're stuffed because it's really hard to just go back and do it again. Maybe with cut-outs it'd be a bit easier but with something like coffee grains it's really hard to get it looking exactly the same.

Soooo...I've done 43 seconds tonight so that's about 1 minute and 9 seconds done and 1 minute and 21 seconds to go. My song has 3 verses and 3 choruses...so I've done 2 verses so far...one more to go...and then the choruses. For the chorus of the songs I'm being more abstract and experimental so I think it'll be a bit faster to animate. I'll be painting with the coffee...just randomly so that the audience can make their own visions from the strokes and textures painted. I hope it looks good. Luckily I'm really ahead so if it doesn't work out I can think of something else to do.

Tonight with the second verse everything went pretty much according to plan apart from the third part of the verse (and the program being temperamental). I wanted leaves to weave in and out of squiggles of coffee...but it proved to be a lot harder than I thought! I'm sure that if I had hours and hours of spare time I could achieve it but it was just too hard to do for 340 frames! So I changed the end and decided to grow a tree instead using basil leaves from my garden. It looks pretty cool and I think it matches the lyrics of the song much better.

All in all I'm relieved to have done another part of my animation. It's pretty daunting because I have to do my animation in chunks. I can't just leave it because the coffee dries on the wooden board...but at least it means that I put aside time and just focus on my animation for a few hours at a time instead of doing little bits which might get me lost and I might not be as into it if I just do little bits. It's amazing because you just zone out doing this and don't realise how tired you are and how late it is till you're finished a few hours later! Luckily I had blueberry muffins to get me through tonight. =P

And let's just hope that I don't spend the next 8 hours dreaming about stop-mo animating like the last time I did stop-mo before bed. Haha.

Aaaaaaaaagh!!!

Problemo numero uno. So I did my first 7 seconds of animation yesterday and it looks awesome. It took me about two hours because I had to do a little bit more planning and move the coffee around on the board (which is more time consuming and messy than moving the cloth around). And then I had to leave everything to go to work...and then I woke up this morning to find the coffee has become all sticky and it's stuck to the wooden board! So now I have to try and get it off and then replicate it so I can continue the animation smoothly. I just hope it doesn't stain. =S So that is my first challenge for this animation. Wish me luck!