3D Cube Jump and Pixelation Assignments

Before I began animating "Mr Cubie" I started with a quick thumbnail sequence of what I was going to animate. It started as an animation only working within the Y axis, however this changed during the process of animating. Although the finished animation was not exactly like the thumbnail sequence, I do think that the thumbnail process that George suggested was very useful into getting into the habit of jotting what I imagined the key poses to be like. It was also useful for getting into the characters head and thinking about how it was going to move. I felt that the Graph editor was a bit confusing when finding which graph did what, however I am quite happy with the end animation, not because it is a brilliant piece but because the process has helped clarify things I felt were confusing; such as learning the basic short cuts for translate, rotate and scale as well as setting key frames. It is an improvement from my previous efforts as I have learnt how to deal with key frames on the time line rather than the graph editor which is what I did in the previous animation (even though George advised against it) which means I could get the timing more precise than I did in my first animation. Unfortunately I had already handed in my work after realising I forgot to hide the nurbs curves but hopefully the curves shouldn't bother the viewer to much.

My first pixelation animation experience took place in a group of four people which included "Sian, Chloe, Thomas and myself". At first we all had really weird and wacky ideas that consisted of little planning and too much time to produce within the time space (which was a few hours). We eventually agreed on doing animation testers, this meant that nothing that we would produce would have animation narrative but instead would be focused on trying out and copying different techniques from the movies that Derek showed us in class that we all thought were interesting. Once we were finished we took it into Adobe Premiere and Windows Movie Maker (because we didn't know how to do certain things in Premiere that we could in movie maker) to edit. Two of the most important things I learned was to use a tripod (even if you think you won't need one) and to always have communication within group work situations, otherwise things can get extremely messy.

Here me and Sian take pictures of the sky, the last part is taken without a tripod which is why its so shaky quite interesting effect but with tripod is more useful. I would like to concentrate on nature more, perhaps take pictures of the sun setting or of a flower blossoming (even though that would take ages)

This one is actually pretty random and was just a timing test to see how many pictures you would have to take in order to make a smooth animation.

Here the group tried a levitation technique however we realised that it was tricky getting someone to jump with the legs in the same position for each picture, and the camera was jerky as we didn't keep it the same height all the way through. We understood the general process but if we had more time to plan the shots more then the animation would appear more fluid.

Here Sians idea of sliding down steps. This is perhaps the closest thing we have to an animation narrative even though its extremely short.

Again sliding on poles here, we were aiming to go all the way to the end of the pole but it was just to painful for me and Chloe.

Here Chloe filmed us walking from behind, she wanted the animation to appear a bit jerky and all over the place show she played around with distance as well as taking minimal shots to make it less fluid.

Once we got back to the studio me Sian and Chloe decided to do two short ideas for pixlation animations both of which could be adapted further and improved. One was called "Magic Hands" which consisted of me moving objects around and making them disappear (while Sian and Chloe helped me by taking the pictures) and the other was "Paper Cut" which involves a knife cutting into a piece of paper which bleeds red blood (it was Sians idea, I just helped because she asked me to take the pictures for her).

Magic Hands, simple pixelation idea ( me, Chloe, Sian)

Paper Cut (Sian and me)

Pixelation Testers

Bouncing Ball Assignment

It appears I cannot hand in my 3d work as I was too late for submission (which was 9 o clock Monday Morning), it is my fault as I was aiming to hand in the project at 1 o clock on the Monday as I had problems with the speed of the animation due to my interpretation of how to use the Time slider. I went in to speak to George about how to fix the problem and he exposed that I was animating on the time slider at 60 frames per second, so when I came to playblast it, it would appear much slower. I fixed the problem and am now posting it on my blog (hopefully George will see the blog post is on the Monday it was supposed to be handed in and won't crucify me for being late).

I did manage however to hand in the 2d animation projects on time (with the skin of my teeth really). I feel that the cube animation I did may be criticized because the character does a flexing motion when he hits the floor, I did this to make it look like the box is pushing himself off the floor when he lands, but i didn't know whether or not the cube is alowed to be flexible or not. I managed to animate both the cube and the bouncing ball in 12 frames. However the ball was drawn out in 6 frames and then reversed from the ground up. i did this because i didn't see much point in drawing the same 6 frames again, while the cubed animation needed to be drawn differently from the ground up.

Assignment One Overview

After receiving my first assignment of a "12 frame circle animation morph" I decided to go to the library for some sort of inspiration. I ended up in the "Occult and Strange Phenomenon" section, where I rented out a few books of interest. One of them was called "Sacred Geometry by Nigel Pennick".




I immediately decided to use the images in this book for my 12 frame animation. The two I decided upon were "The Vesica Piscis And The Outline Of The Great Pyramid" and "The Seal Of Babalon". I played around with both ideas until I came to the conclusion I was going to use "The Seal Of Babalon" but only concentrating on the inner symbol because I was more fond of the image and what it represents.

I was almost certain I was going to use this image however before I went into the studio again I played around with some more ideas. One of which was a "Sperm and Egg" combination with a morphing image of a Yin-Yang shape to a heart. I did like the idea but because it was only going to be 12 frames long I scraped it. I also played around with the concept of the chakra's of the human body, beginning with a morph from the chest (which is the 4th heart chakra) out to reveal a person meditating. Again, just like the first idea It seemed to long winded for a 1 second animation so I stayed with the Sacred Geometrical shape idea.

I ended up adapting the sperm idea to a comet disintegrating in space, as they both have a similar shape. I ended up doing 2 ideas, not to be a ponce but because I had help all the way through the process of using stop motion pro software for the first animation, and I needed to do it twice to gain the confidence to do it properly on my own. I used only ink in my animations however I feel that they are both in need of colour.