STOP... COLLABORATE AND MOTION

Hey guys, it has been a while since blogged about my animation class. We are now doing a group assignment that is a stop motion project. I am working with three incredible animators to create our story. If you want to check out some other things going on with this project check out my partner and friend Kelsie Wilt.


We were inspired by the stop motion music video Morning Elegance that was all shot with the emphasis of stop motion. Our idea deals with a girl having a nightmare that is represented by black sheets that continue to try and capture her. The difficult part of this animations the song we were hoping to put the animation to is four minutes and thirty- five seconds, which would mean we would have to take over 5,000 pictures. We decided to cut the song to two minutes which meant we only needed to take around 1,000-2,500 pictures.

I am hoping to get this project all set up and ready by the middle of next week. Our biggest problem is not having the bed or sheets, we are trying to get some loaned to us, so we don't have to establish a budget that is looking like it would be around $90 for just the sheets. Hopefully we can get a king sheets set and king mattress ready for shooting next week. 

We worked a whole week on the storyboard and it was a hard and long process. 

We had to go through the music second by second and plan out every frame, thankfully most of Kelsie Wilts past projects have incorporated this in-depth storyboarding music sync. 

In the story, a girl is running from her nightmares and is given a sense of hope by a horse that comes to save her. We had done a few tests with the sheets to see what it would look like and it looked awesome! 

I'm hoping to start this project this upcoming week,

and hopefully be finished by the end of November, then 

have post production for about a week. 

And thats a... FLOP

Well, our video to promote our program flopped. The deadline was really early and the video portion of the project was not put together how we envisioned it. We went in and had another meeting with the video department to see what we could do to re-shoot and come up with some new ideas to make the video better and more about our project. We are currently brainstorming and meeting again in about two weeks to share our ideas. The big thing with this project is to to have everyone on board. Both the video and animation teachers need to be fully supporting our idea for the collaboration to work between the two strands (focus groups)
  

So since I had been working at school and at home with the ideas of the cubes, I did not really have time to finish my previous tutorial driven project, so for my final project I will be using one of my test renders for the cube.
I hope to have better news in two weeks!

A Bigger Project Instead

Hey guys, it's been a while since I was last on. The last time I blogged, I was in the middle of a "tutorial" to do the smoke FX from the show Supernatural. I have had to pause that project for a big school project in which all of the Video, Animation, Graphic Design and Web students all come together to collaborate on one project. The project is a promotional video advertising for our program. The central theme is to share ideas and become creative as a whole program. To represent ideas, we are using cubes that continue to pop up above peoples heads as ideas are shared.

The collaboration part of this project has been a bigger challenge than what I had anticipated on. The video group wanted the video to have the animated cubes being passed in peoples hands, like handing someone an idea. With a time frame of two weeks, that idea seemed impossible. We met up three more times that week to see how we could make it manageable for us animators. That is when the cube coming above the head came into play.

Some video people disagreed with the idea, saying it looked too much like the Sims games and that, it wouldn't look good. My teacher and I got a sample clip after the meeting and showed the cube being tossed back and forth, it took us about two hours just to animate  the cube being tossed between two people. This obviously meant that the change of the position and actions of the cube above the head were are only option. 

We will be getting the footage on Monday and begin working our magic! 

This is Harder Than I Thought

Hello all, it's me again. I have made a daring endeavor by try to combine a couple tutorials together for my first project, as I talked about in my previous blog. The effect I am trying to recreate is a "demon" (smoke form) going inside a person, as seen below.

Now this effect is actually harder than it seems. I have looked into  exact tutorial on this effect, but most of them are not crisp and clear as I would want them to be. I then looked at Andrew Kramer's site for Video Copilot. I found a flying smoke similar to the effect in the example video above. I attempted to format the Video Copilot tutorial to the project I was doing, but unfortunately it did not work as I wanted it to.

This is where I will be coming into the career of animation strong. In major animation careers, they do not get to watch tutorials to figure out how to do their entire project, they have to mess with the settings, lighting and sound all on their own and with their own knowledge with the program and animation.

(Top: Andrew Kramer,
Bottom: Original PIXAR Team )

At this point I am actually only about a class period behind schedule, and at the same time I am still ahead on the project, it's just creating the effects without anything to look off of is difficult. A big problem I have been having though is having the smoke get darker. I have played with the color for about three days now and it just won't balance out to be the dark black/gray color. I hope to get this figured out by late this week, early next week.

Here is the final render of the demon possession video FX I did. the entire animation was not complete, but I still understand all of the content and can use it towards other projects i the future.

Well That Idea Didn't Work

As my last blog said, I was planning on doing a frame by frame full length animation. I looked at all of the work I would need to do, and I am seeing it as almost impossible to finish at the due date October 1st. I had it storyboarded and ready to start, so I will most likely keep the project and do it at a later time. I have decided to dive into more special effects, since I have not gotten into special effects as much as 3D or 2D stories and modeling. I will be doing three tutorials put into  one major effect in a video. There will be a scene shot, and will be finished fully animated and crisp. Here is my time line for this project.

SPECIAL EFFECTS PROJECT

AUGUST 29- GET ALL FOOTAGE FROM VIDEO DEPARTMENT SHOT AND EDITED

BLOG: THE TEST RENDER OF THE VIDEO EDITED TOGETHER. TALK ABOUT HOW TO ADJUST THE EFFECTS SINCE THEY ARE BEING COMBINED

SEPTEMBER 3RD- BEGIN ADDING THE SOUL SUCKING EFFECT ONTO THE VIDEO 

(3 DAYS)

BLOG: THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE EFFECT AND HOW YOU FEEL COMBINING THE EFFECTS TOGETHER.

SEPTEMBER 8TH- ADD SMOKE EFFECTS ARE ADDED TO THE SOUL SUCKING EFFECT

(4 DAYS)

BLOG: THE DIFFICULTIES AND EITHER SUCCESS OR FAILURE TO ADD SMOKE

SEPTEMBER 15TH- ADD BLACK EYE EFFECT (1-2 DAYS) 

SEPTEMBER 16TH- BEGIN POLISHING THE PROJECT EFFECTS MAKING SURE THEY LINE UP CORRECTLY WITH THE FOOTAGE. (1 DAY)

BLOG: THE FINAL RENDER OF THE EFFECTS ON THE SCENES AND THE DIFFICULTIES THE PROJECT HAD YOU FACE.  

SEPTEMBER 17TH- BEGIN THE "ANGEL" WING PROJECT, EXPLORE TUTORIALS AND EFFECTS (3 DAYS)

BLOG: YOUR INITIAL IDEA WITH THE WINGS AND WHY THIS WILL BE A HARDER PROJECT 

First Animation Project of Senior Year

Hello all, I am back! I am beginning to put together an animation for my animation class that will probably be my biggest animation yet! I am doing my animation to the song Welcome Home By the Radical Flares. I am thinking of doing a "life cycle" of a boy and a girl starting off as little kids and grow up and having kids. I will be doing two projects in one, first will be stop motion of what I want to put into the animation itself, since my drawing skills aren't up to par yet. I will then trace anything I want to see into Photoshop and put it together frame by frame. I am still storyboarding and brainstorming, but here is my beginning outline of the project. 

 

                  

                  Welcome Home Animation

August 26^th- Start Storyboarding

Blog: Storyboard and plan of how this project will get done

August 27^th- Finish storyboarding, begin getting pictures taken

Blog: Post the pictures and the difficulties having siblings pose and other factors.

August 27- 29^th- Get the photos taken and put together.

Blog: The photo sequence put together into an after effects project.

August 29^th- finish getting pictures taken, begin fancy tracing

Blog: The difficulties of the fancy tracing and how it will be resolved

September 2^nd- GONE FOR GOLF

September 3^rd – October 1st- Continue fancy tracing and finish first part of the project. (I know this is a wide space, but I will be making a new outline once my project is “finalized” and I know exactly what I’m doing)

Blog: The project difficulties up to this point, how you feel the rest of the project is going and what you could have done better. 

Busy Summer, but Ready to Get Back to It

It has been a while since I have gotten on my blog to update you guys on my work over the summer. I am a golfer and am captain on the girls golf team at school this year, which means I had to work my butt off this summer to be the best at my game. I have been traveling around the country playing in tournaments, which means less time at my computer to work on projects. School starts in four days, so I need to be ready to get back in the groove of things.

GISHWHES PROJECT
In my last blog I had mentioned an event called GISHWHES (The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen), that I had participated in and had created the color scheme for. One of the 185 challenges was to create a sci fi movie poster including the actor/ man in charge of this event, Misha Collins and the Queen of England.  Using my creative skills, and two night of my life (while playing in tournaments during the day), I created a masterpiece shown below. 

The most time consuming part of  this poster was Misha's shirt. I painted each square/ tile shown in the picture I was going off of. Just the squares took me around five hours and the rest of his body took me around two hours to complete. His oldest son West (bottom left) took me around three hours to complete, and had some modifications for the painting. In the original photo I was going off of, West was pictured holding a bra. I had to paint his hands into a different potion than where they were in the original picture and make the bra in the original photo look like a blanket in the final piece. Misha's daughter Maison (bottom right) only took me around two hours to complete, because frankly I was just really tired and did not go into as much detail with her as I should have, which was a little bit of a disappointment to me.

The hardest part for me was how to put them all together, I am not a graphic designer, and I do not know how to equal out spaces in photos or drawings very well. It wasn't until 2:35 AM Thursday morning that I had finally gotten it, and it had turned out way better than I had expected.

POSTERS FOR CLIENTS

Today, I went into my Papa's (Grandpa's) optical shop, and noticed some really cool Ray Ban sunglasses posters/ads. I asked him if he would want me to make him one to display in the store, and of course he said yes.


These are some of the examples of the posters that inspired me to do this.

I started off of what I think of when I see Ray Bans, and frankly I think of the movie The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, old milk shake diners, greesers and Elvis, so pretty much anything between the years of 1950's-1960's. Though I enjoy classic styles and music from those eras, I also had to think, what about the people who enjoy or know the 21st century better than the 1950's and 60's.

The two images that I went off of for this poster was a 1958 Ray Ban advertisement and a 2013 Ray Ban advertisement.

One of the difficult parts of this project was lining up the two faces to somewhat match. The glasses on the right were also difficult to draw because they did not have a definite shape in the original image, I had to re draw them over ten times.

I honestly thought the 1958 model would be hard to paint because of the black and white coloring of the original image, but I now realize that even in black and white images, there are many shades of color, not just black and white.

I am not a graphic designer, nor do I want to be one, but doing these paintings is not a job to me, it is more of a relaxer. I love to sit and draw on my computer for hours at a time with my classic rock playing, just because it helps get my mind off of all the other stuff in my life. It also puts my life, feelings and creativity on
a page for others to see.


 When school starts, animation will be a big focus for me, and trying to decide what type of animation
is right for me. College is coming up in a year, and I still haven't made up my mind of where I want to
go, but I know animation will be my career and life.