Okay, time to bring this thing in for a landing!
For your final presentation you'll be presenting:
Your stand-alone final animated film with sound.
A one-minute demo reel with sound. This can include pieces of your final project.
A short write-up of what you've done this quarter for potential collaborators/employers. This is short and informal. You can use this on your blog/Vimeo page.
BONUS: Submit your film to the Ashland Independent Film Festival Student LAUNCH program. It's free! Here are the details. Deadline is January 5. Also, submit your stuff to the spring SOU Student Film Festival!
For the final turn in:
Your updated blog/Vimeo page including your write-up
Your final project and animation reel files in the courses dropbox.
A pdf of your short write-up. Include a still of your work and a bio picture.
Our final presentation is Monday, December 4 at 8 a.m. Yeeks!
Jamie Hewlett animatic for the Gorillaz video, Clint Eastwood.
Felix Colgrave's Double King. This fellow doesn't do animatics OR storyboards and he turned out just fine!
DOUBLE KING from Felix Colgrave on Vimeo.
I really like what he had to say about learning how to animate... This is from his blog on FelixColgrave.com
Someone asked: i want to animate. i just ordered a light box. i have no idea what i'm doing. thoughts?
Good. If you learn animation in an academic context, it’s often taught with a lot of arbitrary dos and don'ts that are a hangover from old industry methods. More concerned with teaching formulas than helping you cultivate a genuine understanding.
Familiarising yourself with the medium and experimenting with it before anyone else has influenced the way you approach it, will harbour an uninhibited relationship with what you’re doing, and you’ll develop working methods that are informed by your current creative processes.
Missing out that step is like giving an anatomy book to a child that’s never drawn before. That would be a weird. Just give the kid some art supplies and let them figure themselves out, then when they’re older they’ll know if an anatomy book is right for them, or if they work with a completely different set of values and processes.
So get that light box and don’t worry about the ‘right’ way to do things. just Play around with it, see what happens, and if you like the way something looks then roll with it. Good luck!
This Wednesday, we'll look at several animations as research for your final projects. We'll develop our discussion around some of these concepts and principles...
Story
Visual storytelling
Complete action
Acting
Staging
Narrative design
Writing a script
Story with and without dialogue
Visual Design
Palette
Figure/ground
Line and shape
"Character" design
Animation Design/Production Design
How is the piece to be made?
Approaches to process
How process influences meaning
Sound
Foley and practical sound
Music
Rhythm
Ambient
Content
Relationship between audio and image
Mood
Intention
Meaning/idea
Below are some approaches to animation that may inspire your own final projects:
Oskar Fischinger, who created this film using... paper and string... egad! An Optical Poem, from 1938:
Another fine example: Norman McLaren's Verical Lines from 1960:
Not to be outdone, here's Paul Glabicki's Object Conversation from 1985... No computers here, either!
A nice example of clear visual storytelling of some crazy stories... Felix Colgrave... viz Zachary Pearson...
This week we'll take a look at the cumulative work you've done this quarter.
What to do?
You'll be "cutting together" a "reel" of your work so far. What the heck does that mean?
1. If you've already got your animations with sound, simply import them into After Effects, Premiere, or whatever video editing software you're happy with.
2. Put them on the timeline to create an edit that contains all of your work so far.
3. Export your mix, name it with your full name, and upload to your blog.
4. Put a named copy of your final mix into the DropBox folder on the courses drive in either ART352 or EMDA 352.
Get all of your good stuff turned in by Wednesday, November 1. Remember, in the grand scheme of life, this is your first time doing this, so it'll get better. In fact, we'll be doing another draft of your reel as part of the final project.
Create a walk cycle and scrolling background... yup... Due Monday, October 23.
We'll also look at advanced students in-progress work on Monday, October 23.
Ye Olde Walk from Richard Williams' useful classic, The Animator's Survival Kit
How to loop your background in After Effects...
Export your walk loop from Animate: File > Export > Export Movie > png sequence. Make sure you choose Colors: 32 bit in order to use transparency. Make sure you save your sequence to an easy to access folder!
In After Effects, import the walk loop. File > Import > File... Make sure to select only the first image in the sequence! If there is a box that says "Import as image sequence", check it! If not, don't worry about it.
After Effects won't loop the animation by default, so right click on the animation in the Project window before you add it to the Composition Timeline and choose Interpret Footage > Main... In the dialogue that opens, set Loop to a number high enough to get the job done!
If you made your background in Animate, choose File > Export > Export Image and export it as a .png. If you made it in Photoshop, just save a copy as a png. Heck, you can also just import the .psd file if you want to get real crazy.
In After Effects, choose File > Import and import your background.
Drag your background from the Project tab to the Composition Timeline.
Select the background in the timeline and hit "P" for position.
Click the Stopwatch icon next to the Position label that opens under your background layer.
Now set the beginning and endpoints for your bg - they should adjust automatically.
Miles demo's the basics of creating a walk cycle:
And creating a scrolling background:
More cycles from SOU alum, Jill Bruhn!
Create at least one looping animation of a character.
Create at least one looping abstract animation.
Both animations should use overlapping action, secondary animation, squash and stretch, timing, spacing, and sound. We'll export these as png sequences to bring into After Effects to further develop. First Draft Due and After Effects Intro on Monday, October 16. Check out the work of Keke who works quite a bit with loops...
Set your frame rate to 12 frames per second. Modify > Document... Frame rate. Adjust your stage size as desired.
Export using File > Export > Export Video... as a .mov
Mac-ishness
Wacom Tablet: Apple Menu > System Preferences > Wacom Tablet... tap tablet with your pen and choose Grip Pen. Go to the Mapping button and check Force Proportions.
Function Keys: Apple Menu > System Preferences > Keyboard... check "Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys."
Shortcuts
F7: insert blank keyframe
F5: add frame
Shift + F5: remove frame
F6: insert keyframe
Here's an intro to the basics of the basics... in Flash Animate
Storyboards Due Thursday, February 16. Animatic Due Tuesday, February 21.
Create a storyboard and animatic for your final project.
A storyboard is a series of drawings representing the shots and key storytelling frames of an animation. Traditionally, story boards are drawn with each drawing on its own sheet of paper. Then, each drawing is pinned up on a board so that the entire film can be seen at once and drawings can be moved around or taken in and out of the sequence.
An animatic is a video of the storyboards cut for shot length and including a soundtrack.
Here's an animatic for the Gorillaz' Clint Eastwood. Note how they are incorporating limited animation into the animatic. Also note the animation design - we can see what parts of the character will move and which will remain static.
Create at least one looping animation of a character jumping on a trampoline.
Use overlapping action, secondary animation, squash and stretch, and of course, timing and spacing to create a nifty animation. Due Tuesday, February 14.
Create a 30 fps, 200 - 250 frame animation with a beginning, middle and end using color, type, shape, and SOUND. All due on Tuesday, January 24. Rough Cut due Tuesday, January 24.
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! An Optical Poem, from 1938:
Another fine example: Norman McLaren's Verical Lines from 1960:
Not to be outdone, here's Paul Glabicki's Object Conversation from 1985... No computers here, either!
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.
a. Miles' motion tween basics:
And for that extra magic touch... nested and instanced tweens!
ooh:
b. Miles' nested tween naughtiness:
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 by using 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 - notevent. Stream, yay. Event, boo. To do this:
In the timeline, select the blank keyframe on the "audio" layer
In the Properties tab, 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!!! Also, you will have problems if your file is not an ActionScript 3.0 file. HTML5 animate files only let you choose Event. Again, EVENT is BAD.
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.
4. The more professional approach would be to do your final audio/video sync in a video program such as Premiere or After Effects. To do this, export your animation as a png sequence and open the sequence in Premiere. You can then import your high quality sound file into Premiere as well. Match 'em up!
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. Create a blog and embed/link to your animation.
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...
