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.