This Week

I'm not sure if we necessarily needed to post this week. I'm looking forward to learning how to key and do more with a green screen. I couldn't make it to class on Monday because of Passover. The one night Jews are allowed to get drunk instead of go to class. It's a good holiday. Anyway, I've been working on my stop motion for Geoff's class. I was originally going to use a green screen but realized I have no idea what I'm doing and that a week from now would be a better opportunity to shoot and key.

Here is the stopmotion.





I think it turned out pretty well.


Also, for my project in this class I'm going to do something with our magic carpet ride shoot. It should be really ugly and cheesy, but hey, I'm learning.

PICKLE PARTY

During a conversation with my father about my art (we were looking at my sketchbook) I was told that all of my artwork seems to be drug induced. Although I am not on any sort of drugs, I think my father would have the same opinion about this piece. I had an idea to have a Spongebob Squarepants type intro scene for a tv show. I originally wanted some sort of hungry beaver or woodchuck to be eating the title, but since Angry Beavers seems to have already done something similar, the next thing that came to mind was a hungry pickle. Seriously, not on drugs.

I would have liked to include another little bit of the pickle eating the title, but this was all I had time to do. The voices are all mine, unedited. Also, I couldn't find a good song to put in the background, so I left it blank. But, it's missing a good song, you know? 

Enjoy.

3D Project

This project went pretty smoothly. Although still completely uninspired and perhaps running out of time for everything I care about in life, this project is at least PRETTY. I recorded a brief conversation between my friend Mia and I and then I made characters that spoke. From there, I made a little scene of a room with drawn images and images I found on the internet and made look graphicy in Photoshop.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to drag a Flash file into After Effects without pixelation. Turns out there is a button. Woo. Anyway check out my silly project.

Re-inspired...maybe

I don't know if I would consider myself once again inspired by After Effects but I seem to be on the right track. And, considering I have this ridiculous hatred of all things 3-D, I would say my outlook is quite positive. Perhaps what I mean when I say "I hate 3-D" is that I hate crappy looking animation done with inexperienced artists. I don't mean to sound so cynical, but there is a quality to 2-D animations that a lot of 3-D is lacking. That being said, I love love love this idea of "posters" or "billboards." I can take my 2-D designs and my doodles from my sketchbook and turn them into wonderful little scenes.

So, for this week, I'm doing just that. I've already started drawing and coloring with prismacolors (yayayaya) this little scene of a living room. And, for my other animation class I'm doing three animal walk cycles. I plan on combining these to make a scene like something out of Jumanji. An ostrich, a skunk and some sort of robot animal will all run through the scene. I will use After Effects to make the scene look 3-D. 

I don't have pictures of my illustrations scanned into the computer yet, but I do have my ostrich walk done. And almost my skunk. But my skunk is making me angry. So I won't be posting it. Here is my ostrich.

Adding Absolutely Nothing to My Owl Movie

I made this Monster Owl in Animation class a few days ago. I really liked him and since I have no project I'm working on with him, I thought I might use it for Visual Effects class. What I didn't realize is that I kind of liked the way the owl monster was. He was simple, there was no background and I liked him that way.

That being said, I thought I'd make the movie a little weirder. A little less explanatory. So, first I used a shape layer to make all of the stars. I made the movement of one star and then copied it and pasted a bunch all over the scene. That way they would all sort of rotate in unison. They hardly rotate, though, which was what I was going for.

The next part was trickier. I wanted to play with masks a little, but I just couldn't get it to work in my scene. I wanted a moon to rise and to suck up the little owl. But, the way I composited all of the leaves etc didn't work with my mask idea. So, I decided to go with what I knew: the paintbrush. I wanted his twirling, flying motion to seem unreal, and so why he's flying all of this lush garden grows. With purple flowers. And then, when he glides back down to his branch they disappear and he blinks. I think the only problem with my construction here was that the video is too short for this to really make sense. It looks dumb. Third week of dumb looking projects. Bleh.





Here is the original, compare and notice how when I didn't add effects it's cooler.

third project

so i'm continuing to build the bathroom scene but already i'm bored with it and probably will build something new for next week. this time, i took out the sound and shortened everything (unfortunately the video goes on for about five seconds after my two second clip...oopsies). i added a toilet and a character. i'm unhappy how "slidey" everything looks. we talked about this in class in regards to "a scanner darkly" and i've encountered it before when using interpolation software (3d studio max, for example). i am going to work on fixing this sort of appearance in my future projects because i believe it gives my work an amateur feel that i want to move past.

i tried to make the woman in the bathtub look angry by throwing her arms up. i used two different segments for her arm parts and parented the lower part of the arm to the upper part. i used nested compositions AND easy ease out on the key frames for the arms.

right now i'm not super inspired by after effects. i like learning the program but it's nothing like flash, which i took to quickly and began to love. i think i might start working with animations i make in flash in after effects. all hypothetical projects of course.

so i was playing with vimeo's badge page. this isn't an update for this week's project. i'm frustrated because i uploaded older videos later on vimeo and so they show up most often. i didn't make that 3-D dog last year, I made it in highschool but it's my only 3-D work. bleh. but mostly i was trying to play around with some html from vimeo to here.