Crocamation-Pig Bouncing

So after a bit of testing, I found one way of not having my Flash CS4 crash on me every 5 minutes is to just take what animation sequence I want to work on and paste it on a new file. So for this week I've taken one of my earliest peeves-the pig bounce.

I couldn't deal with this at the time because I felt easily overwhelmed by the fact the dude is running, bouncing, and so is a lot of things. I found if I just took out the bouncing altogether at the get go and worked on certain parts it becomes doable.

Order of progression:

-timed the swing of his arm

-took all the frames, made the hunter one symbol in flash and from there just made the whole thing 'bounce' from left to right

-timed the hair, pig parts to the up and down motion of the bounce.

Compared to the top this is a little stiffer, but I can fix it either by breaking up more parts to be symbolized or once I do cleanup break the motions there. Either way this sequence is 'done' and I should move to the next clip for temp.

Crocodile Crossing Temp Animation

Crocodile Crossing Temp Animation from LKay Uy on Vimeo.

Well here's the work. It's been a semester of ups and downs and effing flash crashes and hangups and ridiculous backsaving cause the school upgraded 2 versions vs the one I have on my laptop.

Feelings.

Bad:
-Didn't finish it: Due to a combination of high expectations (eg Zeurel and Unknown-Person cranking out animation shorts in a month and a half), perfectionism and low self esteem, there's been a lot of time lost mostly due to self-paralysis, and crushing disappointment when seemingly simple goals (eg timing one scene that I expected done in one hour that ends up taking an entire afternoon) are not met.

-Not my focus: Another big struggle was trying not to think about the fact that I wanted to do something else entirely, which was working on my comics and Quix de Tellou. Course, this just might be another procrastination crutch, but I found myself doodling nonstop on it while I was taking breaks from animating.

Good:
-Excitement from everyone: both teachers and friends are really excited to see this finished, and I definitely want to see this through.

-Diversity: Even if it took me an entire semester and some school counseling to realize I really do want to do comics and love story telling, it doesn't hurt to hear from my teacher that I do have a knack for animating, when I really buckle down on it. What I really wish in the future is being able to earn money with one skill but still having the energy and passion to pursue my own personal projects.


EDIT
Just to end on a positive end note, I am rather happy that my head anim dept teacher is also excited to see me finish this and is letting me come back next semester to use the facilities. Even my senior project teacher doesn't mind me dropping by his class if I need some more feedback with my clean ups phase.

Animation Tutorial- the Girl

So for my second half of Animation tutorial, our teacher was kind enough to let some of us seniors use that time to work on our senior projects, provided it had some level of thinking/acting in it. I'm kind of glad I thought ahead and had this scene for just that purpose. 

The general critique I got out of my teacher was what were the motivations behind the cuts and the people for their reactions to each other. He didn't like me going back and forth on my poses (cutting and duplicating poses for time saver) so I have to vary them up a bit and tweak some bodies and shots. The most challenging part for me at the moment is creating a believable motivation as to why the girl stops looking at the guy and looks out to the bridge. Overall this is adding more screen time and framework for me to do.

Speaking of bodies- I just realized that the costume for the girl was totally different from that of the villagers I had in mind earlier. Based on this site- the dress the girl is wearing is that of a Kimona Dress /Patadyong (a casual wear of filipino women of the visayas region), but I needed something more tribal-oriented like the Matigsalugs

new character sheet for girl WIP

SO-Week 7

Essentially some major music tweaking needs to occur:
-The two dudes and the missing pig need more frames/time since it goes by too fast, so I need to loop a music longer in that point.
-Jungle run through possibly
-The pan shot (now a pan, so Hunter needs to scootch out of the shot too) needs maybe 2 more frames an a cushion so it doesn't come in and out of the shot so badly.
-The scene with the girl also needs extending since things happen too fast.

Then the parts that need trimming:
-Hunter landing on crocodile- suggested making an overshoot of the croc's open jaws might give me the snap I was looking for.
-The entire sequence between the guy looking out the island and before he does the crab dance will be trimmed out (thank god).

Overall it seems I'm in an odd place since I'm still behind on some blocking, but went overzealous and jumped the gun on other pieces.

Two weeks left and I need half of all this already animated (not yet cleaned up, but at least the in-betweens and stuff are put down).

Crocodile Crossing Version 0

Vimeo Link: https://vimeo.com/49054411

Still figuring out where's a better place to upload the WIP videos, but in the meantime:
This is the bulk of work I've accomplished over the summer on my croc animation. Just last weekend I had a ball of a time playing dress up and shooting some reference videos.

Hiya Thurston

June has been pretty dead in the water in terms of legit art stuff. There's random doodles of animation like this and kalkie gags over at my deviantart and tumblr account.

The most important stuff that occurred was my brother's graduation from UC Santa Barbara at the 16th, and me being here in LA with my sister until the Anime Expo from the 29th-July 2.

What I want to spend this whole time on is trying to write out the script for my Necromancer collab script while I'm with my sis her writer bf.

Poses are Fun

So our class assignment was to create a whole bunch of poses.

It was an overtly vague prompt so I just did what I always do which was doodle my characters interacting with one another. GGK was the first and easiest set to do mostly because I haven't drawn them for a very long time, compared with Necromancer and Silhouette where I think I used up all the usual kinds of interactions between themselves. XD

Even though I worried a bit, I found out soon enough I pretty much went overboard with this one compared to my other classmates. My teacher gave me a lot of good notes about why my poses worked and not, and I jotted it down for reference.

Makes me uber glad I got into comic making first.

Breaking Down Animal Walk Cycle

How to animate a step box

Animation at the Seniors Room

Woke up this morning with the resolution to get to school today, grab my 3d animations and script (which I left in my account desktop because of the blackout).

Woke up 10:15, bus leaves at 11.

Grabbed all my veggies and laptop and just ran to the bus.

Since Colleen is actually a senior level, she let me into the Seniors room- basically a small room of maybe 10 of these babies http://computershopper.com/shoptalk/peripherals/wacom-cintiq-at-new-york-comic-con

Gods it's awesome *w*

I finished blocking in most of tellou's hair and clothes, and sort of fizzled out after 3 or so. (Roughs ver 1) http://kalkie.deviantart.com/art/Character-Weight-Shift-263318744

I don't know where the hell the others have the energy to keep drawing. Well at the very least, I finished my obstacle course in 3d and more or less did more work on the single leg walk cycle, i think.

Dunno why, but there's nobody at the anime club at the given time, so I'm just going to wait for the 8pm shuttle. at least I can go home earlier and eat something.

Character Weight Shift Blocking

Rather nice today that I woke up without having to cram for the Acrylics color class.

In 2D today I did some character weight shifts-

but since Jamie didn't have the videos with her, we just did some new ones with a webcam and from the bunch me and the teacher settled on this one.

Tiles and Weight shifts

Tile thing didn't turn out so well, and it was because of the lack of contrasting values in the hues- though teacher did say that the color palette had a nice, summer feel to it.

For 2D animation Ryan gives me another positive feedback on how fast I can doodle out my blocking. |D;

It's pretty easy once you know the steps on blocking out. (well these simple cycles anyhow)
Draw out the first and last poses.
Then the middle pose/passing.
Then the in-betweens (They're called squash/reach in a walk cycle)

I guess I work so fast because a lot of people already draw out their forms and outlines, I'm just more concerned about seeing the flow and will worry about the real proportions later on.

A happy turn of events in Color for Illustration

Holy damn- pulled a 5 hour miracle cram of printing/tracing, copying to new paper, and painting 2 tile patterns for Color for Illustration. Also good that QB gave me some of that bread we baked last night so I had some carbs through class. 

Wouldn't you know it- I spent more hours/time planning the Pacman Tile and they all preferred the Bee Tile. Kinda wanted to laugh and punch the classmate who explained the reason he preferred the Bee one was because the other one looked like 'a simple screenshot that was taken and then pasted diagonally'. 

But what got me in an overtly good mood was the fact I was doing much, much better in workshop today! Teacher said I was getting better with painting in acrylics and was more confident in my colors. HAPPY. :D

In Animation we did some more refining with our walk cycles. This was on Monday.

This was after teacher's critique- mostly about doing more ease in and out of the arm swings, and then fixing the positioning of the feet so it wouldn't make a big pop when the left foot swings across.

He also left early because he felt sick. Spent the rest of the time goofing off and listening to classmates belt out Disney songs before we all left at the usual class time.