Stop Motion... The Plan

Our stop motion animation is going to have a slight comedic genre to it. It starts with the main character falling off a Motorbike and discovers some Zombies. A fight breaks out and he manages to fend off the zombies until one bites him on the ankle and he says "Looks like this is the end" followed by dramatic music. Then some random figure pops into the screen and yells "ugga bugga bugga!"  well that killed the mood...

Prezi for Trip

Unit: 33 Stop Motion on Prezi

New Art Style

This is a new drawing style I have been working on. It's slightly more cartoon style then manga. I got the inspiration from some drawings I saw on a vocaloid music video. I thought "I wonder if my characters would look good done in that style" and it turns out they do... well... Jack does anyway, I haven't drawn any others yet. Anyway I hope to try and develop this style more.

Vocaloid 3D poses - Kaito

This figure was premodeled but I rigged it myself. I put the model into a pose that looks like a fighting stance. It was quite difficult trying to get the fist as natural as possible but it turned out ok. The facial expression wasn't difficult to make because the Softwere I used had a prebuilt system for that kind of thing. I haven't learnt how to animate on the softwere yet but I will soon figure it out with practice... and youtube... anyway I plan to try to animate a practice drill of some kind in the near future. Right now, poses is all I can manage. After all, it's hard to master a new softwere

Stop motion inspired Flash Animation

I have made a flash animation of a little stick guy going Super Sayain and firing off a Kame Hame Hah. It's on a permenent loop and looks really good. It was difficult to get it going but once I figured it out and got started it was easy yet repetative. I want to make more flashes like this in the future. Unfortunately I cannot seem to show you the product.

Comic Strip Reflection

I will Compare my Flash animation with TOME, a professional series on Newsgrounds.com My animation doesn't really move a lot so the characters are always static. Although both examples are of a comedic genre I think TOME portrays it better because it's fully voiced and is a lot longer... it also has funnier content. The characters in my comic don't really get introduced and you are just thrown into it but in TOME it takes time introducing each character and develops them well.

•What could I do better next time?

            I guess I could include more animation in mine. It was a little static and only speech moved plus one instance of a gun moving into the screen. I could also include a little more explanation to the story, the characters just... pop into the animation without any introduction and you don't really get to learn their names.

•What skills could I improve upon?
                  I need to improve my animating skills in flash and include buttons and more dynamic animations. My Flash art skills are good but they could use some toning, I'm to used to tracing images and not drawing my own. Also planning needs to be to a higher standard than just a few slides and storyboards. 

•What went well?
            I think the art aspect of the project went quite well. The visual style was consistent through out the animation. The speech of the strip stayed consistent too, it was a well rounded animation but there wasn't much to it, but maybe that's its charm; short, sweet and funny. Makes sense if you think about it, the longer a joke is the less funny it could become if told wrong.

•What did not go so well?
            At first I could not get the timings and frames right but after revision I just added more frames and it seemed to work out fine. During the process I did come up with a few bugs like missing frames and animations that didn't quite go to plan such as in the Confused Seeker panel the question marks would not move the way I wanted until I redid that part of the animation until it functioned correctly.

•Time management – did I use my time well?
            The time I was allowed gave me more than enough time to complete the animation and Revise it several times before handing it in. So I believe I used the time to the best of my ability and possibly more. I seemed to finish before most people in the class and even had time to do other animations such as a simple platformer game that actually worked.

•What have learned – how far have I traveled
            I have discovered that I am quite a good Flash artist but I realized I still need a bit of work on animating. When I first started the project I was a little nervous because I didn't really know how to work in Vector form but once I grasped the basics I gained confidence and produced some good pieces of work such as a fully functioning platforming game with simple reset boxes and even a Vision camera that follows the character.

•What am I confident with

           I am confident with my ability to create good pieces of artwork using Flash's drawing tools. I'm also confident with the timeline and how it works. I am now confident in using Flash as a whole.

Particle Effects

It's been a while since I posted 3D work on this blog. I decided to test out some particle effects like this one witch is a bomb witch is a Geometric Space Warp and also added in a SphereGizmo with a fire effect on it. It was tricky to figure out how to use these tools but in the end after a few minutes looking through Youtube for a good tutorial I managed to produce this video.