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...