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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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 - notevent. 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.
