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).

Senior Project Pitch

After a winter's break of dead ends, and moping and ponderings,
my sister and I  finally hit* a simplistic scenario that I hope will all work out in the end:

Dude wants to cross a river, crocodile's in the way.

I made the pitch to two teachers and they seem pleased with the idea of it-I'm happy with it myself.

*By hit I mean I started out with a story about a dude trying to meet with a girl but her dad doesn't let guys in the house and dude has to be all sneaky like and sis didn't like it and said 'simplify' it further and I got all BAAWW and she had to cheer me on and then randomly suggested maybe it should be 'just a dude meeting a girl but there's a croc in the way!' and then I thought more about it and it just evolved into 'screw the girl- I just want to see the dude vs croc!' and that is how awesomeness is born.