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
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.
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?
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...
