To start off I want to take a moment to tell a you
also about how wonderful these kids are, and that I’m happy with how open the
people I’m having to work with. They are letting their ideas change and fit in
to the time we are given. The one thing I feel is the worst part about it is
that they are having trouble getting talking without me. So with that I have a
story to tell: Just this weekend I have had to work with someone that didn’t
talk to me, they didn’t tell me what they wanted, and then throw out what I
made and started work on it themself to better fit their own idea. They had
something in their head that they wanted this group picture to be, and I and
the other team mates weren’t told what they wanted or that they didn’t like
something. In the end they changed it so it was to their liking and didn’t talk
to the group. They didn’t show anything and didn’t like the feedback they got.
To me this is a bad sign; if they can’t talk to their teammate, this will be
fatal to them getting a job in the art field. Talking to your team, and staying
focused with make or break you. Planning also plays a huge factor.
[The Work Load]
I’ve been placed as the manager and co-animator of
the group. My job for the most part is to get them talking, think up easier
ways to do things, and to make ½ of the art for the animation part of the film.
I try to not be the one to give a lot of ideas to the group and let these kids
problem solve the things that get in the way. I’d also the one that talks to
every kid, asking what he or she plan to do today, what they did, and to tell
them what the others are doing. I’m trying to also make anything big art choice
we make be something that’s the whole group voted on. My goal isn’t to run this
show, but be the thing that keeps these kids working together. Even if they
aren’t talking at first (or they don’t think about talking to the rest of the
team about what they are doing) I get them talking to each other and having a
say in the choices they made. The ones that engage and take part in the group I
have no doubt they will work well in a team. They aren’t pushy and are heart
broken over their ideas being crushed or changed. They take the feed back they
get they get told the facts and info they needed to make a good choice and they
don’t disregard stuff. I’m so proud to be apart of this team.
That
being said, there are slow kids that don't give input, don’t engage, or do their
own things are the ones I fear the most for. I can’t make them get involved
because they don’t want to. Some of them are also shy and don’t have
either then spine or the willingness to say what they think could make things
better, but they are getting better. Even the softest-spoken girl in our group
is talking to everyone and is working well with all of him or her. Then theirs
the one. Because this is something I plan to show to more people then just my
teacher I’m going to leave out his name. we’ll just call him Zed for now, and
my teacher will most likely be able to fill in the blanks as I talk about him.
Zed started off in the group giving ideas, well they were good ideas there were
also bad ones. When we pushed a good amount of them away because they were
either to hard to do in our two week time frame, or they were poor ideas that
were boring or done far to much, he shut down from us and started to do less
and less. At one point we even started planning around him, because we also
know his work habits and how he was handling this. Right now the only job Zed
had to do is the make the credits, witch he did do at the end
[My Work]
I started this with getting the kids idea and
storyboarded it. Then I did what I did with the last animation I worked on
cleaning that up. This time however I made a timed animatic to see how things
would look simple and laid out and timed. Once I got the times I needed I then
needed to compile it. Once we showed our idea we got to work, I know I would
have to draw every doddle and scribble. Taking the base idea that I made in the
rough story bored I made it larger and more detail. The problem at first was
tiring to fine a brush that would work on a computer that looked like a
real pencil made it. In the end I found two brushes one was called “Airbrush
Soft High Density Grainy” this gave something, at lest to me, that looked
like pencil lines. The other was “Airbrush Soft Low Density Grainy” this was
used for the eraser do to how it acted when it rubbed away the lines.
The first thing I made was the “animoo man head”
this was bay far the worst so far to be made as I wasn’t sure how to get that
smudged look that I found out later… and it was meant to look the worst from
the get go.
The next thing I made was the eye. This was where I
learned about smuggling of the brush and got to make it look as good as I go as
I could. It was hard to animate it do to this detail. I had to find a way to
mix these new over laying shadow on top of the old ones with out making darker
more noteworthy parts standing out.
The next doodle was “Donald trumpet” it was a
trumpet with it’s combed over hair blowing in the wind as he plays a sick solo.
This was the hardest and the easiest at the same time. Making the trumpet it
self was hard at first then I fund better refs and used more smudged shadows
then lines. The hair or the making it looked like Donald trump, the person this
jokes making fun of, was the other hard part. I found that I liked the pictures
of Donald with his combed hair blowing in the wind so I tried to get that in
the drawing.
The last thing I did before I needed to take on the
sexy bone man himself was to make the scribbles template. It really was more of
the case of, make one animation of a scribble then copy that as many time we
need but have it start or end when ever we need it to look different from each
other. So we didn’t have to draw 20 scribbles, witch they are things that
always change their look.
With them out of the way the big problem was
drawing that hot scull head himself, and that was easer said then done. the big
problem was that, I was faced with was that the human body is hard to draw with
a mouse, and second was that nothing about him moved.
all of the other shots had something moving
in them, but he was sort of standing there. being a hunk yes, but just
standing. then I looked at and it and it hit me. he needed this long flowing
hair, to forever seal his boney good looks, I did it. that was easier said then
done once again. when I was making the hair I found that if I didn't make it
white it would be come see through, and I wanted to it cover parts of his face
and rib cage. but then we had to problem of then we can't see the lines of the
paper.
[Putting It Together]
My last job was to pull all of
the drawing in to after effects and animate them, and the string them together.
so this meant now something things I had to get moving, and others to just show
up and do their thing.
There were a lot of problems. The
scribbles were a huge pain for like three days because they wouldn’t loop or
they wouldn’t be see through. The way in which we ended up having to fix it is
by making a desktop folder and making a Photoshop photo PGN sequence. This then
gave me to the freedom to change them, loop it, and have it be see through.
The next problem was with the
starting shots; I had to making a call how to make it clearer about the fact
they are now in this paper world with the shots with them all here. So I change
the order of the shots so we see them all here in this world then we sort of
zoom in on the highlighter to start the montage.
The montage itself was fully of
problem with each one with timing and having two people work on at the same
time. The biggest problem that I ran in to was me putting the file in to after
effects wrong. That was fully my fault but I still got upset about it of course. There was also a problem with the trumpet
where it was spinning so fast that you only saw two frames of it and I had no
idea how or why it was going so fast. On top of that it was spinning the wrong
way. so you just see this trumpet spinning at warps speed with it’s hair
blowing in the wrong way.
And with all that I was able to
put it together and had to make it in to a mp4 file so we could make add it to
the full video. That sounds easy, but some how everything was wrong. To start
with for some reason it was changing the size of the video so when you viewed
it: it would be able to see all the little pixels, And it would be discolored.
I’m glade I watched it before I sent it off because at one point I would here
back from this. So then now we had to find out why it was doing that. We
thought we fixed it and we tried to save it. Only for it to be saved as .M4v a
file type we can’t even view on the mac I have to work on. So we had to reset
all the settings for after effects.
With that finally fixed I was
able to render it and send them the full MP4. Now my job was over, I asked if
there was more I could do, but they seemed like they had it under control. I
trust them not to disappoint me.
