Flash Character Designs

I first began by trying to gather a style for the flash animation by first listening to the people as and jotting down ideas as I went along. I focused mainly on the eyes and the mouth as I knew they would be the symbols i will be focusing on animating the most. I went through some quick thumbnails in my sketchbook of all the kind of concepts i wanted to cover for the animation. Once I had all my ideas gathered I decided to concentrate on three ideas and see which one worked the most by taking the characters further. These included the idea of talking shoes, a boy and a girl sitting in a park and talking mushrooms. I decided to take the aspect of mushrooms further because this is a lip syncing project and since I am very unfamiliar and new to flash, I opted to choose a character that doesn't have any limbs to animate. This way I could focus on the narrative animated aspects of the eyes and the lips. I chose the mushrooms over the shoes, as the mouth of the shoes would just flap up and down and wouln't really be apropriate for this exercise. I went back to the sketchbook and came up with the following designs:

This character was a male, and the placement on the mouth was tried at the top before it was placed on the stem.

I felt that the eyes were the most prominent feature, so I focused on adapting each pupil differently in each character design, some were big others were small, again gathering inspiration from the voices of the people.

After I had an array of designs I took one into illustrator first because I am a bit more familiar with the software. I decided to work in black and white at first because I wasn't sure what colours to use for the mushrooms themselves.

I am still not sure about the colours I have chosen for this character however since it will be in flash I have the option of changing them quickly if I feel the need to. The mouth is not included in this exported flash image as there are multiple symbols (as there are for the eyes as well, such as eyes with eyelids to show sarcasm, anger, etc) as it is a component that is changeable as it Will be animated.

The process is the same for the other drawn mushroomed characters, (for the two girls) but for some strange reason Blogger is not working properly and is not letting me post more images as it has frozen, but I will add them and edit this post as soon as I am able to.

flash animation character designs

I first began by trying to gather a style for the flash animation by first listening to the people as and jotting down ideas as I went along. I went through some quick thumbnails in my sketchbook of what kind of concepts i wanted to cover for the animation. Once I had all my ideas gathered I decided to concentrate on three ideas and see which one worked the most by taking the characters further. These included the idea of talking shoes, a boy and a girl sitting in a park and talking mushrooms. I decided to take the aspect of mushrooms further because this is a lip syncing project and since I am very unfamiliar and new to flash, I opted to choose a character that does'nt have any limbs to animate. This way I could focus on the narrative animated aspects of the eyes and the lips. I went back to the sketchbook and came up with the following designs.

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)