Week 6: Final Projects

Due Dates:
Tuesday, November 8: Animatic 1 & design docs
Tuesday, November 22: Animatic 2 - must include sound and beginning and end.
FINAL SHOW: Tuesday, December 6, 10:30. Enter film in AIFF Launch Competition 

Final Project:
Your final project will be to create a short film and enter it in both the Launch competition at Ashland Independent Film Festival AND the SOU Student Film Festival. Joie! We'll be scheduling various production check-ins along the way. For Tuesday, November 8, you'll be presenting your animatic and design docs.


Treatment: Your idea expressed in any medium you can get your hands on. It can be any unwieldy, crazy collection of sketches, writing, scrawls, photos, pieces of felt... whatever works for you. The idea is to start cobbling together a story and some art so you can articulate your idea to others and put together a production plan. In my experience, I make several treatments, that, in retrospect, as a whole, form one big, ugly treatment... 

Story: As Uri Shulevitz describes it in Writing With Pictures,

• A story... presents a progression of events from beginning to end. That progression of events is the action of the story. At the beginning, an objective is stated or suggested, or  a problem is introduced. The action of the story is complete when the objective is attained or the problem resolved... A satisfying children's story always presents a complete action.

Your story is your idea compressed down to a concentrated essence of beginning, middle, end. It does not involve any extraneous details such as costumes, sets, locations, colors, etc...  it is the raw plot, the skeleton on which you'll hang everything else.

Script: Your script is a practical document that builds your story into a guide for making your animation. It describes the story in practical terms, including dialogue, (if any), scene changes, camera moves, fades, descriptions of character actions/reactions etc. It may resemble a traditional movie script... or not! An abstract animation will have a very different-looking script than a dialogue-driven one.

Storyboards: Drawings of key shots of your script/story in visual form. These are working documents meant to aid you in tightening and fine-tuning your film. Re-arrange them. Cut them. Add them.
Eric Goldberg's Donald Duck Storyboard Pitch


Animatic: Your storyboards cut to video. Probably ought to include a scratch audio track.
Animatic for Gorillaz, Clint Eastwood

Animation Design / Production Design: How a piece will be put together as an animation. How will things be made to appear to move? Frame by frame? Hand-drawn? Cut-outs? Jerky? Smooth? How will lip sync be handled? Will some parts of the animation be done by hand? Includes conceptualizing and defining the workflow/pipeline. Will usually involve creating some...


Animation Tests: Taking your film out for a spin... with a test you are trying out your idea to see how it will actually work. You may do several tests that experiment with combinations of animation design and art direction. Depending on where you are in the process, these may become part of your animatic or be based on your storyboards. Sometimes a random test gives rise to a new story or shot idea.

Visual Design / Art Direction : Color palette, visual style, backgrounds, character design. What is this thing going to look like?? The works. Can involve "concept art," but this is usually pretty frigging bad/useless unless the concept artist is a genius or has a solid background in animation.

Research: You'll need lots of this in order to get a good thing going. Research can revolve around art direction (mood boards), animation design, storytelling, editing... anything.


Love and Theft from Studio FILM BILDER on Vimeo.

Week 6: Walk Cycles

Create a walk cycle... yup... Due Tuesday, November 8.

Ye Olde Walk from Richard Williams' useful classic, The Animator's Survival Kit

Miles demo's the basics of creating a walk cycle:

And creating a scrolling background:
More cycles from SOU alum, Jill Bruhn!

Sneaky Guy Cycle from Jill AB on Vimeo.

and. . .


Running Man with Cat from Jill AB on Vimeo.

Richard Williams' Run Cycle

Week 4 - 5: Motion Typography / Motion Graphics / Mid Term Film Festival

Project 4: Motion Typography/Motion Graphics
Create a motion graphics piece integrating typography.
Due Tuesday, October 25.

Week 5: Midterm Mayhem Student Film Fest!
Tuesday, October 25 is the Midterm Mayhem Student Film Fest! Be ready to show ALL of your work to date. Bonus: Cut it together to make a proper reel. October 25 is the hard deadline for all of your projects to date.

Background
Non-representational/abstract animation is central to motion graphics or motion design, which combines traditional elements of static, 2D design such as form, shape, color, photography, and typography with animation and film/video. When we animate a letter, such as, 'R' in a motion graphics piece, we are not trying to mimic the natural movement of 'R's as seen in their native habitat. We are making abstract choices of movement based on our own impulses, whims, and desires. This aligns motion graphics very tightly to music composition which is simply manipulating changes in sound waves over time. Contemporary examples of motion graphics are inescapable. Help! Animated logos, movie titles, phone and gadget interfaces. It's dystopian nightmare, I tell you, but think about how amazingly cool you can make someone's drab life for five seconds...  Here's a link to some contemporary examples of "kinetic typography"...

http://www.designyourway.net/blog/inspiration/some-of-the-best-kinetic-typography-examples/

Nice examples of motion typography and branding for the now crowd...


Technical

• All of your type will need to be converted into a graphic symbol.
• Once you've converted the type to a symbol you can leave it editable or you can break it apart. Once you do this, it is no longer editable. You can also break apart symbol instances. This un-links them from the master symbol. If you want to tween something that has been broken apart, make sure the broken pieces all reside in a master symbol container!
• You can include any other shapes/drawings you'd like in your motion graphics designs.
• Yes. Sound. Yes.

Week 3: Abstract Animation

Project 3: Abstract Animation

Create a 30 fps, 200 - 250 frame animation with a beginning, middle and end using color, type, shape, and SOUND. All due on Tuesday, October 18.

Background
Animation does not always have to involve characters or the illusion of observed life; we can simply create movement for movement's sake. Such an approach is a kinetic (moving) equivalent of abstract or non-representational art and design. The tension between conventions for representing three-dimensional reality such as perspective and chiaroscuro and purely abstract two-dimensional visual forms such as pattern and writing, is essential to art of the modernist period (roughly 1860's-1970's). For those of you fearing you have missed out on the dizzying elixir of the modernist era, rest easy; this tension 'twixt abstraction and representation is very much alive and well and still a crucial element in all of our our contemporary visual chicanery.

Check out an early example of abstract animation from animation pioneer, Oskar Fischinger, who created this film using... paper and string... egad!

Technical
1. Starting a file. Important! When starting a new Adboe Animate file, make sure you choose ActionScript 3.0.

2. Make sure you are working at 30 fps for this project. Select Modify > Document to change your frame rate. "Shooting on ones" will make smooth continuous movements like pans and slides much more palatable. Slower frame rates create a noticeable "strobe" effect. Ghastly!

3. Before you can tween, you must convert your drawing into a symbol. Make sure your symbol is of the "Graphic" file type, NOT Movie clip.

4. Learn all about making symbols in Miles' amazing video below:



5. Once you've gotten the hang of symbols, you're ready to do some tweens. Tween is short for in-between. Traditionally, in pose-to-pose animation, we would draw the main storytelling poses, or key frames, first. Once we had the timing of those keyframes down, we would go back and fill in the the rest of the frames inbetween the key frames. Nowadays, tweening refers to the process by which the computer interpolates (mathematically figures out) the frames between the keyframes.



And for that extra magic touch... nested and instanced tweens!
ooh:


And here is a quick gif of some nested tweens... er, uh, dank?

Sound
1. Use Adobe Audition to make your sound mix. Export as AIFF or mp3.
2. In Animate, import your audio file to the Library. File ... Import ... Import to Library
3. In the timeline, create a new layer, name it "audio".
4. From the Library, drag and drop your sound file onto the document stage (not the timeline).
5. You should now have a sound wave showing up starting with the frame 1 blank keyframe of your "audio" layer. Right click on the timeline and choose insert frame to extend the keyframe if you need to. To adjust the length of the clip, cmd-drag the end of the frame range.

               VERY IMPORTANT.    VERY IMPORTANT.    VERY IMPORTANT. 
6. When working with sound in Animate, make sure to set the sync property in the Properties inspector to STREAM - not event. Stream, yay. Event, boo. To do this. Select the blank keyframe on the "audio" layer, open the Properties tab, and set Sync: to Stream. An event sound will play regardless of the timeline. This is bad...very bad. If you export your video and there is no sound, it is probably because your sound instance is still set to Event... boo!!!

Change to stream. You won't regret it...

Additional pro audio tips (chortle)
1. Cut your sound DOWN to roughly the length of your animation BEFORE you bring it in to Flash. Do not import a 6 minute piece of music for a 12 second piece.

2. You can do some simple fade ups and downs in Animate to fine tune to your animation, but do as much as you can in Audition.

3. Don't be shocked if you need to go back to Audition to make changes to your sound file after you've brought it into Animate. Relax, it's all part of the fun.

Week 2: Bounce Cycles

1. Create a frame by frame bouncing ball cycle. Show your grasp of timing, spacing, pose to pose, and squash and stretch. Awesome. Yay.

2. Create a new animation in which you turn your bouncing ball animation into a GRAPHIC SYMBOL and place multiple instances of your symbol on the timeline.

3. Create a frame by frame animation of a character bouncing/jumping showing overlapping action and secondary motion. As always exaggerate to create an appealing show of it all.

Post all of this goodness to your blog. Due Tuesday, October 11.

Week 1 Project: 100 frames! Story!

Enter your BLOG URL on this spreadsheet today!

Due: Tuesday, October 4

1. In class make a 100 frame animation. Go ahead and set the fps to 12 or 15. Sign up to Vimeo if you haven't already and upload your work there.
2. Storyboard, script, and record the audio for  a 10 second narrative animation.
3. Create a blog and post your audio, script and storyboards to it.

BTW, the 12 Principles...

1. Timing & Spacing

2. Squash & Stretch

3. Arcs

4. Secondary Action

5. Anticipation

6. Staging

7. Overlapping Action (Follow Through)

8. Slow In & Slow Out

9. Exaggeration

10. Straight Ahead & Pose to Pose

11. Solid Drawing

12. Appeal

Here's an intro to the most basic of the Flash/Animate basics...

FINAL CRITIQUE

Is on Tuesday, June 7 at 8:00 a.m. in MA 110. 

Have your work online, but also have a file to turn in.

File should have your name in the filename.

I'm going to submit these to RVTV unless I hear otherwise...

Final Project - It's Terminal!

 
Jamie Hewlett animatic for the Gorillaz video, Clint Eastwood.

Our final project will be to create a short animation for all the world to behold. This project should be your original content - your characters, sets, imagery, story, etc. All sound should be cleared as well. You'll have many opportunities to show your work. Think ahead to the Ashland Inedpendent Film Festival, SOU Student Film Festival, EMCON, or Oregon Fringe Festival. Charles Douglas will come next week to discuss opportunities for broadcast on RVTV -Rogue Valley Community Television.

Link to editing motion paths in Flash.
Link to using the Motion Editor in Flash.

For Tuesday, May10, rough out a short animatic. An animatic is the city-slicker cousin of the storyboard. Storyboards break a story down into the key shots needed to tell a narrative. An animatic is basically storyboards put into a video sequence with an audio track. Unless you have some specific reason for not doing so, make your work at 1920 x 1080 resolution at 30 fps. This is standard 1080p 'HD' tv format. All projects must include audio.

• If you are working with character and story, take your character(s) and create a short animation with a complete action.
• If you are working with motion design, create an abstract or type-based animation.
• You can also work with any unholy hybrids you'd like - stopmotion, pixilation, 3D, etc. etc. No limits on your approach to the technical!
• All animations should be 'finished' for public viewing - think beginning, middle, end, titles, credits, etc. Make sure you have clearance for all sound and you credit all collaborators appropriately.

Charge!

BONUS! Jennifer Harlow's undergraduate blog - lots of insight and animation resources!

A nice example of clear visual storytelling of some crazy stories... Felix Colgrave... viz Zachary Pearson...

Project 6: Pixilation!

Make a pixilation piece.
Shoot your footage this weekend.
Experiment. Get crazy. You can collaborate!
Check out the classic 1952 film, Neighbours, by Norman McLaren that uses this technique.
Due Thursday, April 28.

Neighbours from National Film Board of Canada on Vimeo.

Project 5: Lip Synch/narrative

Create a 5 - 10 second animation that incorporates voice. This can involve character lip synch and/or voice-over narrative with attendant visuals. As always, give us a few moments of blank screen before it all kicks off and when its all over.


Due on Thursday, April 28.

Project 4: Character Sequences

Create a set of character animation sequences for use in a 2D video game.
Come up with a set of walks, jumps, punches, deaths, power-ups, etc... you think it up, you do it.
Upload them as animated gifs to your blog. More examples coming... later today!
Due Thursday, April 21.

Oh, and here's some stuff on doing walk cycles...

Ye Olde Walk from Richard Williams' useful classic, The Animator's Survival Kit

Miles demo's the basics of creating a walk cycle:


Link to URL


And creating a scrolling background:

Link to URL

Richard Williams' Run Cycle

Link on how to import an image sequence at 12 fps into Premier...

Project 3: Motion Typography and Abstraction

Check out Oskar Fischinger... cut paper and string... yikes!

Your challenge is to create a 30 fps, 200 - 250 frame animation with a beginning, middle and end using color, type, shape, and SOUND. All due on Tuesday, April 12.

This is about design as much as animation. Let's get crazy and call it... motion design, motion graphics, kinetic typography... whatever....  Commercially, you see a lot of this kind of nonsense used in branding in the form of animated logos, interstitials, and the like. Think about how amazingly cool you can make someone's drab life for five seconds...  Here's a link to some contemporary examples we looked at in class:

http://www.designyourway.net/blog/inspiration/some-of-the-best-kinetic-typography-examples/

Nice examples of motion typography and branding for the now crowd...

Technically, you'll be working with symbols and tweens in Flash. Miles lays out these basic goodies in these here videos. Folksy. Important! Make sure you are using ActionScript 3.0 and set your symbol types to GRAPHIC.



Once you've gotten the hang of symbols, you're ready to do some tweens. "Tweens" stands for "in-betweens" as in you, the human, set the keyframes, while the computer interpolates (figures out) the changes between the keyframes for you. The tweens we're doing will require that the drawing to be tweened is first converted into a symbol. Behold.



And for that extra magic touch... nested and instanced tweens!
ooh:


And here is a quick gif of some nested tweens... er, uh, dank?

Working with SOUND.
1. Use Adobe Audition to make your sound mix. Export as AIFF or mp3.
2. In Flash, Import your audio file to the Library. File ... Import ... Import to Library
3. In the timeline, create a new layer, name it "audio".
4. From the Library, drag and drop your sound file onto the document stage (not the timeline).
5. You should now have a sound wave showing up starting with the frame 1 blank keyframe of your "audio" layer. Right click on the timeline and choose insert frame to extend the keyframe if you need to. To adjust the length of the clip, cmd-drag the end of the frame range.
6. VERY IMPORTANT. When working with sound in Flash, make sure to set the sync property in the Properties inspector to STREAM - not event. Stream, yay. Event, boo. To do this. Select the blank keyframe on the "audio" layer, open the Properties tab, and set Sync: to Stream. An event sound will play regardless of the timeline. This is bad...very bad for animation!

Additional pro audio tips (chortle)
1. Cut your sound DOWN to roughly the length of your animation BEFORE you bring it in to Flash. Do not import a 6 minute piece of music for a 12 second piece.

2. You can do some simple fade ups and downs in Flash to fine tune to your animation.

3. Don't be shocked if you need to go back to Audition to make changes to your sound file after you've brought it into Flash. Relax, it's all part of the fun.

Project 2: Bounce, bounce, bounce - Ignition (remix)

Create 2 cycles of characters bouncin' - Roughly 15-30 frames each.
Due Tuesday, April 6

Alum Jill Bruhn does a bounce cycle...


Symbol-based dog animation from Jill AB on Vimeo.

Project 1: 100 Frames, er, uh, I mean, "Revenant Rising"...

Day 1:

1. In class make a 100 frame animation.
2. Upload it to Vimeo.
3. Create a blog and post a link to your 100 frame video.
4. Due by Thursday, March 31.

Tech Notes!

1. This exercise works better if you lower the frame rate to 12 fps. Do this from the menu:    Modify>Document... This is also where you can adjust the dimensions of your canvas.
2. Handy shortcut for adding a blank keyframe: click on an empty frame or select a range of empty frames and hit F7. (That's the function key F7, not the letter F and the number 7!)
3. To move the playhead back and forth on the timeline (it's the red bar/line that shows you which frame you are on in the timeline) use the comma and period keys. It's a hoot! I mistakenly say "arrow keys" on the video, because I'm an idiot...
4. You can turn pressure sensitivity for your Wacom on an off by hitting the toolbar button that will look something like this:
   
5. Export from Flash to Video: File>Export>Export Video... Experiment with turning the Convert video in Adobe Media Encoder button on and off. It's not too important for this first project, but down the line, you'll probably want to get savvy with the encoder options.

This video covers introduces some of the basics of getting started in Flash:

Final Projects

FINAL CRITIQUE: Wednesday, March 16 8:00 a.m. in our usual lair. Note early start!
Bring a file of your work, so we can submit to RVTV as well as a link on your blog.


You make animation so people can see it, so let's do it. Your final project will be built around two cool opportunities to get your work out there into the ether... If one is good, two's better; do both!

• RVTV--SOU's community television station. If you're doing a straight narrative animation, this would be just fine, but this is also where you could experiment with doing "interstitials" - 5-15 second shorts that build "identity" for a station/program/promotion. Here are the RVTV logos. Click to download!
• SOU Student Film Festival - A night of mayhem in the historic Varsity Theatre in downtown Ashland, Oregon, USA. Professor Andrew Gay will be here next Wednesday to get you hip to the haps.

We looked at some nice examples to get you fired up to make some great stuff. For next Wednesday, February 17, be ready to present a short pitch on your final project ideas. Be able to tell us about the animation design, color palette, length and the like.

IMPORTANT: All work should be done at 1920 x 1080 (HD format) at 30 fps.

Nice examples of motion typography and branding for the now crowd...

Golden Wolf via TJ Todd

Project 4: Midterm Mayhem

Jamie Hewlett animatic for the Gorillaz video of Clint Eastwood.

Our final project will be to create a short animation for broadcast on Rogue Valley Community Television. For next week, rough out a short animation.

• If you are working with character and story, take your character(s) and create a short animation with a complete action.
• If you are working with motion design, create an abstract or type-based animation.

To create your piece, we'll be working with storyboards and their city-slicker cousin, the animatic. Storyboards break a story down into the key shots needed to tell a narrative. An animatic is basically storyboards put into a video sequence which may include a scratch audio track.

Oh, and here's some stuff on doing walk cycles...

Ye Olde Walk from Richard Williams' useful classic, The Animator's Survival Kit

Miles demo's the basics of creating a walk cycle:


Link to URL


And creating a scrolling background:

Link to URL

Alum Jill Bruhn does a bounce cycle...


Symbol-based dog animation from Jill AB on Vimeo.

Richard Williams' Run Cycle

Link on how to import an image sequence at 12 fps into Premier...

Project 3: Character Animation

Yes, it's Jeff...

Create some animation studies of a character in movement. In class, we talked about animation design - that is, how the character will change from frame to frame to create the illusion of movement. These should be SHORT studies. Certainly no more than 100 frames! Maybe as few as 10 or 20. The key is to jump in and try stuff out! We'll do small group crits on Wednesday, January 29.

Here's a very rough break down of animation design approaches. Most contemporary animation designs involve a combination of multiple approaches.  

Frame by Frame Animation. Each frame is drawn by you - the animator. An oldy and a goody. Still the best way to achieve naturalistic movement and full control of a character. Each frame is a unique drawing with an attendant organic, non-mechanical feel. This approach can be obsessively naturalistic (Disney, Miyazaki), "cartoonish" (Warner Brothers, Adventure Time), abstract (McClaren's  Lines), or anything in between... If you can draw it, you can animate it. Notably pioneered by Winsor McKay.

Some of Milt Kahl's work on Disney's Jungle Book...

Replacement Animation. Instead of drawing a new frame, you swap out a pre-built symbol. This approach was used in the facial animation of Jack Skellington on Nightmare Before Christmas, and less famously, in Miles' Jeff animation. The effects can be subtle or rough.

 A few of the over 800 heads used to animate Jack's face.

Limited Animation. Made famous by anime productions with ruthless production schedules and low budgets, this technique puts the weight on cinematic composition and editing while minimizing the amount of time spent creating naturalistic character movement. Uses lots of "tweening" to slide characters around the screen and simulate camera movement.

 Speed Racer c 1967 - Whole lotta 'tweening' goin' on! 

Cut-out Animation. Creating distinct body pieces that are tweened to create the animation. In Flash this would entail using nested symbols and tweens. Lotte Reiniger's shadow puppets and South Park are examples of this style of animation.

Cut-out animation characters from an unknown American TV series.

Pro tip: Don't spend a long time designing your character without trying to animate it. Your design will end up being radically altered and simplified by the time you get to the second frame! Let the character evolve by animating it. Trust the process to discover the underlying structure behind your character's movement.

Project 2: Short abstraction

Check out Oskar Fischinger... cut paper and string... yikes!

Okay, let's work with abstraction! We've started to play with narrative - beginning, middle, and end. Let's apply this same concept to abstraction. We don't have characters as such, but we have stuff changing over time, so heck, we've a veritable possum stew of possibility... definitely.

Your challenge is to create a 5 second animation with a beginning, middle and end using color and shape. Extra special credit-- include sound in your video. When working with sound in Flash, make sure it is set to STREAM - not event. Stream, yay. Event, boo. All due on Wednesday, January 20.

This is as much an exercise in design as animation. Let's get crazy and call it... motion design or motion graphics. Commercially, you see a lot of this kind of nonsense used in branding in the form of animated logos, interstitials, and the like. Think about how amazingly cool you can make someone's drab life for five seconds... 

Technically, you'll be working with symbols and tweens in Flash. Miles lays out these basic goodies in these here videos. Folksy. Important! Make sure you are using ActionScript 3.0 and set your symbol types to GRAPHIC.



Once you've gotten the hang of symbols, you're ready to do some tweens. "Tweens" stands for "in-betweens" as in you, the human, set the keyframes, while the computer interpolates (figures out) the changes between the keyframes for you. The tweens we're doing will require that the drawing to be tweened is first converted into a symbol. Behold.



And for that extra magic touch... nested and instanced tweens!
ooh:


And here is a quick gif of some nested tweens... er, uh, dank?

Winter 16 Project 1: Gettin' started.

Due: Wednesday, January 13

1. In class make a 100 animation. Upload it to Vimeo or Youtube.
2. Storyboard and script  a 100 frame narrative animation.
3. Create a blog and post your script and storyboards to it.


Here's an intro to the most basic of the Flash basics...