I blog about my creative works. (The relevant works at least.)
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Grade for Group Project
Mr. Place has sent out grades for the group projects. I got mine last night. He said that I displayed great leadership qualities and thinking skills. He also said that he would be using our project as an example for future classes (which I think is too cool ^_^) . As for the grade...99! I was beyond thrilled. I even jumped on my dad (who was very confused for about 30 seconds till I explained). I'm so proud!
After a prolonged visit from the drama llama yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised this morning when Michael told me he had fixed the scene that had messed up. Thank YOU!
Today is presentation day. Here it is, in all its frustrating and squishy fluffy goodness.
Don't criticize too harshly, my flash teacher loved it apparently. And we've given up trying to call them A.F.A. anymore (Ambiguous Fluffy Animals TM) Everyone just calls them Bears.
I dont think I have ever felt more frustrated. Not even when I was in Media Tech in Highschool have I ever felt this overwhelming need to destroy a computer so badly as I do now.
We have completely finished with all the scene animations for our group animation project. We've also named it, "Dance Fluff Dance". All that remained this morning was to put the rest of the music in and piece all of the scenes together in flash.
This is where our problems began.
First, because we used the same symbol in many different scenes, it refused to let us piece them together. What happens to a symbol in one scene also happens to it in another. We fixed this by renaming the symbols in each scene (through the clever use of addons like aa, aaaa, asdfasadf, and omgfinish!). Time consuming and irritating but it worked.
Then, we had to deal with putting the scenes in the right order. Flash does not have an easy edit timeline specifically for scenes. To make the easiest time of it you need to animate the first scene first, then hit "new scene", and then animate the second scene and so on. We had two animators working on one project meaning we could not do this.
Thirdly, IT ATE A SCENE! It errored an entire scene and then refused to let us save anyting so we could try to salvage. We managed to export it under flash 8 but the video has a little messed up continuity. Michael is going to take it home and work on it before trying to turn it in at 5. Hopefully he can fix this. If I paid him, Id give him a raise.
Will be posting final project up soon. Cross your fingers!
For our group project Sarah came up with the idea of random ambiguous rodents doing the YMCA. We all thought this was hilarious and went with that idea. Last week was mostly picking a song to use and brainstorming ideas for the rodent characters. In the next three days we'll start animating. Me and Sarah are doing the backgrounds and Michael and Crystal are doing the characters. We have until the 17th to finish and then presentation is on the 18th. I finished a scene today in class. Really simple, grass and clouds. The underground rodent hole will be tough, I'm still not sure how many scenes we will have and I don't think that Michael and Crystal are collaborating like they should be, but we all really like the idea so i think we can pull it off. We chose a character design today and Sarah drew out a small scrap storyboard over the weekend. I was right in picking her for the team. She really is a fount of ideas.
Here is the background that I finished today.
Oh yeah, and i will eventually find a decent FREE flash to video converter. If anyone knows of one please let me know. ^_^;
Today we got our next assignment in flash. It will be a group project, an animation spanning at least three minutes with original characters using shape/motion tweens and sound.
We were required to have groups of four, with a Production Manager, two Production Artists, and a Sound Manager.
I volunteered to be a Production Manager, which meant I got my pick of who I wanted in my group. For my Production Artists I chose Michael and Crystal. Crystal is the girl with the cute flash whom I mentioned below. For my Sound Manager I chose the girl who sits behind me, Sarah. She had a very simple flash, but she's really smart and seemed confident when I asked her opinion on what kind of animation we should do.
We decided to do a music video. Kind of cliche' but it sounded the easiest, none of my group professed to be great writers. We spent most of the class period listening to different songs to get a feel of which one we might like to make a video about. We are aiming for one that has some form of story. If I can get some Todd Rundgren songs from my Dad they might want to do that. So far the idea is going in an "epic teddy bear" direction.
Lucky for us, Michael has some flash tutorials that he is willing to share with everyone. There are three tutorials, one the walk cycle, another on basic drawing in flash, and the other on backgrounds. I'm looking forward to watching them.
Now if only there were some decent tutorials for Newtech Lightwave and I'd be in business.
For my second cartoon we were allowed to make it on anything we wanted but had to do everything in a certain order and complete steps.
1. Sketch out character 2. Write story (if its story intensive, otherwise summarize!) 3. Story Board 4. Begin character animation 5. Begin background animation 6. Title cards and loading screen
That was the list that he suggested was likely to be the norm for any animation jobs (more or less). We actually only had to have a 30-second cartoon so I didn't even get to finish my whole story board. Either way I ended up with the (2nd in my opinion) cutest flash in class. Here's what I have so far.
On the other hand, where my flash was really simple, a classmate of mine, Michael Moran, went online and found some very good tutorials for walking sequences and other things. He came out with this. (This isn't the other cute one.)
I give him an A+ for independent research and hilarious subject matter. (Hope you don't mind my publishing you Mike! Too good to not show!)
He was probably the best in the class. It was simple and direct, it had a beginning and an end. Not to mention that it was so well drawn.
There was one other girl who I think had a much cuter flash than mine. If she posts it up ill see if I can link to it but I don't know her as well as Mike so I wont be posting it here.
This was a lot of fun, I will try to post my storyboard idea if I can find a scanner. Warning: Drawing on computer is much easier than drawing on paper. XD
After three days of flash class I managed to create a small cartoon. I went online and looked for some cool tutorials and found one with a ball. So my first flash features this little ball, although I dont think it ever had to deal with things exploding.
So there we have it. The ball, the rocket, the cut-out explosion cuz i was lazy, and back to point. Ta-da! You may praise my lameness now.
