Last One

As my project draws to a close, I'll leave you with a link to the presentation that I'll be giving in a few weeks. Here is my powerpoint, if you want to take a look.

Goodbye and thank you for following along!

Everything But Animation

Hi everyone,

This week I didn’t do much animation; I only spent three hours on my SRP because I’ve been visiting colleges since last Thursday. I actually flew home between visits just to attend the BASIS powerpoint presentation workshop. 

I’m pretty tired right now since I’ve had kind of non-stop visits for a while. Since I don’t have all that much new information about my project to share with you (I’ll be doing extra in the coming weeks to make up for what I didn’t get done), I figure I can just talk for a bit about my visits and the art-related things I’ve done.

I mostly just drew during my flight to Boston and while waiting in the airport. Here are some sketches from that time:

I’ve never tried to draw while being jostled around by turbulence before, so that was an experience.

I was also working on converting this image into a video, but I forgot to export it before I shut down my laptop so I lost the timeline. The drawing was inspired by an illustration that I’m struggling to find right now, but I had seen it months ago and thought it fit the look/aesthetic I was imagining.

In addition I drew the person sitting across from me while I was waiting to board at Sky Harbor. I think he might have seen it when he stood up so hopefully it isn’t a good enough likeness that he recognized himself.

I always draw a circle to place the head and end up completely ignoring it

My project might not have progressed much, but I did advance my personal art knowledge a bit. For example, this week I learned what shrinky dinks are. Apparently my life has been lacking in crafts. If, like me, you have no idea what a shrinky dink is, it’s a drawing on this weird type of paper that shrinks and hardens with heat. So I basically microwaved some doodles and ended up with these little charm-type objects:

I also went to the Boston Museum of Fine Art. I was hungry the whole time but it was lovely. There were lots of intriguing textures and the rooms were alternately too hot and too cold.

Next week I’ll be doing extra SRP work so I will have more to show you.

Not Sure What Week It Is But Hello

I think most of you probably get the gist of how I’ve been animating at this point, but sometimes I feel like I don’t explain things very well or could be more detailed. And on one of my last posts Keanan asked about how I do it, and I don’t think I ever responded (sorry Keanan) so I’m going to now. While I was working these past couple days I recorded my screen to show you exactly what I’m doing. Unfortunately I only remembered to do that after I’d already gotten some layers down, but you’ll be able to watch almost the entire process.

I’ve been practicing drawing facial expressions because I think I could use some work there. I have this habit where I make whatever expression I’m trying to draw, which is not useful at all but makes people look at me weird sometimes. Anyway, I decided to draw my monster feeling down in the dumps.

Each of these videos was originally about 25-30 minutes long so I’ve sped them up quite a bit. With that in mind, maybe you’ll get a better sense for how long it takes me to animate. I was also working pretty messily here, with basic shapes, scratchy lines, and only a few colors, and a more complex scene would take even more time. 

In the above video I’m drawing the lines. Because most things stay the same from frame to frame, I copy each layer and make minor changes instead of redrawing it each time (which is what I had to do in earlier videos I’ve shared—the walk cycle, the birds, all of the volcano videos). 

Here I start coloring. I make a layer underneath each layer of linework and just color under it. The stripes of colors in the corner are on a separate layer on top of all the others. They make it easy to change my brush color without having to change between layers. 

Apparently I was recording audio too, sorry for the weird sped-up noises in some of these videos.

Now that the coloring is done I can take all of my layers and convert them into an animation. 

This is how you string layers together into video. I’m showing you both ways: create a video timeline (first) and create a frame animation (second). I’m not too sure of the technical differences between the two, because they can both achieve pretty much the same result through different methods. I use the first method to make videos and the second to make gifs. 

This part always seems like it takes forever. Especially for the create-a-video option, I don’t know if there’s a way to shorten all the pieces at once so I have to do each one individually. And I can never decide how fast I want the frames to play, so sometimes I have to change the length of each piece three or four times. But I didn’t fidget with the speed as much as usual here, because it’s such a simple animation. 

I made a mistake in the video that I caught and corrected in the gif. I accidentally switched two layers and the colors ended up on top of the lines for one of the frames:

And here’s the gif:

the colors here are truer to the psd than those in the videos

I think this kind of super-short animation is my favorite. It’s still the same effort-payoff ratio as a longer animation, but it’s less of a commitment and I never get bored of it before I finish, which tends to happen if I try to make a 15+ second scene in one sitting.

It's April Fools' Day

Happy April Fools' Day! This morning I thought this was the day Caesar was killed, because I forgot about the ides of March, but nope. I was wrong. It's just the first day of April.

So I finally have a walk cycle to show you! I made a couple but this one’s my favorite:

I still need to work on how the weight is carried, and obviously the figure isn’t detailed, but I’m happier with it than I was with earlier ones. That was the last one I did, and surprisingly it took a lot less time—hopefully because I’m getting better, but that remains to be seen.

I always struggle to get the correct up-and-down motion of walking. I forget how legs are positioned at the height of the stride and as a result everything looks a little off. This time I bit the bullet and used a guide the whole way through, and that saved me a lot of annoyance. I had a book on the basics of animation laying around and it had some very helpful tutorials, and also this less-relevant but still interesting explanation of how to draw a dancing alligator.

And as I’m writing this I see that the book also has instructions for animating a dancing hippo. Kind of an odd niche but I like it. Anyway, if you’re curious, this is the reference I used to help capture the bobbing motion:

In addition to walk cycles, I’ve been drawing lots of birds because I like it and I want to. I like the idea of a trio of birds bobbing after my main character, but I like drawing them much better than I like animating them. They’ve gone through a lot of iterations, but I think these three pictures give you the gist of it (the first drawing is from a while ago, maybe three or four weeks).

Do you think I should change their names? Claude, Henrietta, and Noam (thanks Nithin) were also in the running. FYI, despite having traditionally gendered names, these birds are agender and reproduce asexually.  It's just that when I looked up gender neutral names, Laundry was at the top of the list. Laundry.

I really liked this background from last week (that I posted Tuesday (I think)):

It might be the first one that came out looking almost exactly as I intended it to, instead of veering off in content or color or whatever else. I drew a few more scenes from that same environment. 

I don't know what I did wrong with my brush settings, but I could not draw one clean-edged line in this. Everything was a little blurry. I think I made the picture small enough that it's hard to tell, though.

My original idea was actually set in a swamp, so I was thinking about that a lot in October and November. However, the story kept becoming too similar to Over the Garden Wall, which I love but which I do not want to plagiarize. So instead I redirected, but I’m glad that I’ve been able to work some of those initial thoughts into my current plan.

That’s what I’ve done this week that relates directly to my project. Admittedly I’ve been doing a fair amount of drawing and animation that has absolutely nothing to do with my SRP, and I keep getting sidetracked and trying out different Photoshop tools (specifically, I spent a while messing around with brushes while I was drawing birds). I feel like I should retitle this blog Doing Some Animation, and Some Other Stuff, and Playing With Photoshop Aimlessly. 

So I’ll leave you with that.

ALSO: I keep forgetting to mention this, but there’s a science fiction short film called World of Tomorrow that I really enjoyed (and apparently it won an award at Sundance, so if you don’t trust my recommendation maybe that will convince you to watch it). The way it uses color is similar to how I imagined I would be doing in February, and to be honest, after watching it I kind of wish I was making something weirder. I watched it with our very own Molly Ono and it’s on Netflix. Go forth and see!

And a second ALSO: Okay, I checked and I misread Landry as Laundry, but my point about gender neutral names still stands.

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.