Week 13 Outside of class

Outside of class I created a short storyboard on our next project. The next project is a morphology assignment, where we were supposed to create three objects that reflect our character and have them morph into each other. For this assignment, I chose a game controller, dragonball and comic book. Since I was a kid, i've always loved videogames, shows such as Dragon Ball Z and comics in general. Below is my storyboard demonstrating how I think these elements should morph into each other.

Week 13A

In class we had watched a series of insightful videos centered around graphic designer Rick Morris. It was interesting seeing into the life of an actual successful graphic designer and hearing their thought process, freelancing, tools among other things. After watching the videos, I had spent the rest of the class finishing my animation. I had finished the entire animation and had fixed previous issues that I've been experiencing with it. I had managed to make the head recoil in a more realistic way as well as having the cigarette in his mouth react accordingly. I had also added and animated minor details such as blood splatters and gun smoke at the ending. Overall i'm quite satisfied with the animation. Although I didn't follow my storyboard exactly, I took ideas from each of them, tweaked them, and put them in motion. My only regret with the animation itself is the ending, as I feel like it may possibly be to abrupt. Due to time constraints, I wasn't able to start an entirely new scene and thought it'd be best to polish and correct other parts of the animation. Below is the final product.

Week 12B

Class was not mandatory. Instead, we were given scheduled times to meet with our instructor and given suggestions on what to change. The biggest thing plaguing my animation was my type. While I was told my animation was pretty good, the type is too uninteresting. Some of it appears and vanishes too quick, while other names clutter the screen and are hard to read. I had attempted to fix this by removing some names on screens and animating others. I had also went back and clarified what task each team had done. (i.e Music, Director, etc.) I thought this was very effective and made the credits much more interesting to look at, as it isn't simply random names remaining static within the composition. In addition to this, I had begun working on the next scene for the animation. For the scene below, I plan to have the firearm shoot a bullet which travels to the next screen. To create something interesting for the type, I plan to have it fire out the gun as well, just to make it a little more dynamic.

Week 12 Outside of Class

Outside of class I spent the weekend making the suggested changes that I've been holding off. Over the weekend I had:

• Fixed a bit Pulp Fiction title in the beginning still showing at the top of the screen.
• Lessened intense blur of transitional lines.
• Animated the "Starring" credits. I had also removed the rest of the names on the screen and kept it to only two.
• Fixed credits from jumping on car chase scene.
• Other minor details such as timing

I had made a lot of progress on the rest of the animation as well. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the names to shoot out of the gun like I had mentioned in a previous post. When doing it, I just couldn't get it to look right. Having two names flying out of the barrel of the gun was too awkward no matter which approach I used. In the end, I decided to use the approach of having the names come in from the corner of the screens like my other credits. Although it isn't exactly what I had wanted, I do think this may be better as it's consistent with the rest of my credits. 

As mentioned before, I had added a completely new scene to the animation also. The scene is still in-progress however. In this scene, the bullet travels across the composition and strikes a man through the head. I wasn't completely satisfied with the animation however, as I thought it was a little awkward how the bullet traveled through the figure and he didn't react. Currently, i'm working on making his head and neck react to the impact of the bullet, which is a task.

Week 12A

Today I had added a new scene to the animation. I followed the same idea of having the scene follow the car as shown in my storyboard, but this time I had decided to take a more interesting approach rather than having it be a flat graphic. I had used the effects in Adobe After Effects to create the illusion of a car speeding down a road while the view is top-down. I think this makes the scene a lot more dynamic overall and keeps up with the intense fast-paced animation that I was aiming for. Overall, i'm really happy with it. I do plan to fix the way the credits are animated in the car scene, but I had included them so you can get a rough idea of what it would look like once it's finished.

Week 11 Outside of Class

Outside of class i've corrected the small issues that I was told I needed to fix for my animation. I've completely tried to change the last scene, which is where the car pulls into the scene. I've decided to change it into a 3D view to make the overall animation much more dynamic and add additional depth. I felt like that scene was a little too flat, so I had decided to add a scene where it goes first person and the camera goes flying into the background approaching a cityscape. Unfortunately I don't have too much to show at this point since it's still very rough and heavily in progress, but hopefully the scene will be very effective.

Week 11B

Today I had got very useful feedback for my animation. While much of it was positive and saying that my animation was going in the right direction, I did have a few things that needed to be changed. The feedback that I had received was:

• Blur on moving lines are too intense.
• The type should be more dynamic. Having it remain static is boring in such a fast-paced animation.
• Silhouette of the female smoking is too "blob-like". Although she's a silhouette, her form gets lost and isn't very detailed like it should be. 
• Too many names in the scene with the woman smoking. Reduce this to fewer names. 
• Clarify what each team did. (i.e Art Director, Music, etc.)

Following this advice, I decided to fix the silhouette and simply and hair to it, which I thought was the biggest problem. When taking a second look, the model did look too blob-like, and I feel the cause of that was due to the hair on the model getting lost in the body. 

Week 11A

In class I received feedback on the current state of my animation project. So far I was told that my animation was going in the right direction, but there were a couple things that needed to be added/removed and changed. Some of these being:

• Blur on transition lines are too intense
• Credits need to be a bigger part of the animation
• The way the bar rises into the scene is too strange.

So far i've corrected two of the three problems, as i'm still finding ways for the bar to enter the scene while transitioning in a way that makes sense.

Week 10 Outside of Class

Outside of class I had worked more on the Pulp Fiction animation that I had been working on. So far i'm really happy with it, as I learned a lot of new tricks in After Effects. I had learned how to create different effects using the particle systems included in AE which allowed me to make the smoke from Mia's cigarette. In addition to this, I feel as if all of my transitions and the pace of the animation overall is very fast-paced and clean just how I had imagined it. I do plan to go back however and possibly add more detail to some scenes, as i'm not super excited with the scene that has Mia in it. Compared to everything else, it feels a little plain to me. But so far, i'm very happy with how everything is coming along.

Week 9 Outside of class

Outside of class I worked on a few more frames for my upcoming movie intro sequence. I wanted to try something new and stray away from fully vector-based graphics and tried to incorporate actual footage from the movie into my project. I want to really push this project and try new things I haven't done in After Effects before, such as messing with different effects like blur.