Images, My Favorite

as promised:

I'm trying to figure out how to make the dots move around slowly. It'd be easy in Flash, where I could create a motion path, but in Photoshop I have to move them by hand and it makes the motion look jerky instead of smooth

here you go Casey

And this is the walk cycle I mentioned last Friday, plus an animation that I meant to put in my March 18th post but blogspot wouldn't let me embed it

I remember that took me SO long to do, and then during critique all the TA said was "hills get lighter as they recede" and I was like OKAY THANKS TIM (but now my hills always get lighter as they recede, so in hindsight it was helpful)

Happy Nondenominational Second Spring Break

Hi everyone,

I am currently en route to Sedona, and I stupidly left my laptop at home so I won't be able to share any photos with you today. I'll probably post some backgrounds when I get back on Monday or Tuesday, but for now we will all have to make due with this bland and imageless blog post. I also can't check the word count on my phone, so I'm just going to wing it and hope I end up above the requirement. Also, enjoy this large font that I can't change back to normal.

This week, I mostly worked on more of the same: drawing frames and backgrounds. I actually had to switch out the nib on my tablet pen because the edges had started to fray from all the use it's been getting these past months. One new development is that I've been drawing walk cycles for different characters. These are pretty self-explanatory, but in case you haven't heard of it, a walk cycle is a series of frames that show the different parts of a gait and loop to show someone walking (or running, shuffling, etc). Previously I've only done walk cycles in Flash, not Photoshop, but so far there isn't really a difference between the programs. I haven't made one that I'm satisfied with yet, but I do have an old one that I might post along with the other drawings once I have my laptop.

I'm not sure whether I mentioned this, but I was planning on the last scene of my animation being a dance party (mostly because I want to animate weird movements and it's a good excuse to use bright flashing colors, but also for legitimate narrative reasons, I swear). A few days ago I found a short that solidified this plan. It's called Slaves of the Rave and was made by William Garratt. I think that link should work, but blogspot keeps warning me that Safari is an unsupported browser and ''may behave erratically," so if it doesn't work it's easy to google. The short doesn't actually have much dancing, and it's not super visually complicated, but I found it very entertaining and I really like the line quality, so if you have a minute you should definitely go watch it. It also has a lot of yellow and I love yellow.

Someone else that I've been a little inspired by is an artist named Juliette Brocal. I recently was talking to a classmate of mine from a RISD summer thing, and she mentioned this artist. I really like how illustrative and gestural her work is; it reminds me of concept art. She mostly does digital art but uses very textured brushes, and her backgrounds sometimes look a bit like a collage. Her color palettes especially caught my eye.

Sorry again about no pictures, but I'll put them up after the weekend, or at least in next week's post.

Hi everyone,

I forgot to post that my break was last week, so: my break was last week. It was nice to not hunch over my tablet for a while, but I did feel a little anxious about my progress. This project is about halfway over but it isn’t halfway finished. I think this is partly because I keep finding myself spending time on parts of the process that aren’t actual animation, like drawing lots of different backgrounds and objects and experimenting with character design. Today I spent two hours messing with brush settings on Photoshop without even realizing it.

here are some tree type things, plus everyone's favorite, mushrooms

At this point I’m fairly sure that my animation won’t be as long as I projected in December. I do still have many weeks left, but I know my pace won’t match up with my original end goal. For some context on why I think this, two years ago I spent a month taking art classes at Otis College, and I spent 24 hours a week animating with a professor present to help me with each little problem that cropped up. I made several short animations, but none longer than one minute and all very simple. This was the first animation I ever made:

I don't even have the actual video, just this extremely shaky video I found on my phone. That animation was meant to exemplify stretch and squash, one of the basic principles of animation (I only got halfway to making the circle into frog before I had to move on, so I forgive you if you can’t tell what it is). Here’s another short that’s slightly easier to parse:

 Now I’m committing less hours per week than I was while at Otis, and I’m also using a drawing tablet rather than a Cintiq, which is a bit harder for me to adjust to. But the main reason is that my interests have shifted. Usually when I make art, I don’t like to plan it out. I mentioned before that I chose to make my color script less detailed because I didn’t want to tire out my ideas. That happens often when I make thumbnail sketches or plan projects, and this was the most planned art piece I’ve ever undertaken. I’m not surprised that I’ve gotten sidetracked by the individual aspects of this project (mostly character and background design), and I haven’t lost enthusiasm, but I do wish I could’ve kept my momentum going. However, I’m actually not too disappointed because I’m still intrigued by all the facets of my project. I’m also very glad to learn all of this about myself now rather than after, say, deciding to major in animation. Of course, I’m not going to stop animating, but I think the end result will be more exploratory and experimental than I previously intended.

Look at that Unicorn! Just Kidding, Those Aren't Real Even Here

Hi everyone,

I may go back and make some minor tweaks if I have time, but these scenes are essentially finished. Yellow isn't showing up too well in Blogger's video format, so just imagine everything is yellower than it appears to be.

The landscape is fairly similar to my rough draft in form, but the colors shifted a lot. If you recall from a couple weeks ago, the volcano started out blue, almost teal, and now it’s somewhere between lilac and lavender. 

I ran into an unexpected problem when I was trying to compile the mp4s into one video. I’ve never used multiple PSDs (Photoshop documents, a file format that preserves layers) for one animation before; all my previous animations were short and uncomplicated enough that I could use only one PSD. Since this animation has varied backgrounds and is lengthier than anything I’ve made previously, creating scenes in individual PSDs made sense. However, when I exported the PSDs to mp4s and tried to combine the videos in Quicktime, the estimated wait time quickly jumped from 10 seconds to this:

Considering that that’s longer than I’ve been alive, I need to find a new method of combining the smaller videos. I tried iMovie first, because it was automatically installed and seemed easy enough to use, but it forces me to crop images in a way that hides parts of my drawings. Although this problem isn’t really a pressing issue at the moment, eventually I will need to resolve it or I won’t be able to string all the pieces together.

Here is an in-progress look at the very first scene, which takes place before the first video above. The yellow caterpillar-ish arc is the motion path of a bird in flight (remember those blobby bird sketches from last week? Now they’re blobby digital sketches!)

In retrospect, the colors of the first couple scenes actually match pretty well with my laptop background. Maybe I’m unconsciously inspired by it.

I’ve found that the best way to work is in short bursts; otherwise I tire myself out or become frustrated by how hours of work can boil down to three seconds of motion. Taking breaks helps a lot, and I usually spend them drawing for my own amusement. Since my group member Casey shared a picture of me on her most recent blog post, I’ll leave you with this gif I made of her when I was bored today.

Unrelated to my project, but watching the eyes fall out of time with each other feels like a weird poor man's version of Felix Gonzalez Torres' "Untitled" or Perfect Lovers. Minus the meaning and deep sentiment.