Completing the animation

Great work by my fellow group members. They have done it a lot to make this to perfection. For some reason I wasn't been assigned to be doing any work for the final production by my group members but I am satisfied if I am given the appropriate mark to reflect my contribution. Chunyin has done a tremendous job in keeping everything in progress while Saiful and Saifullah has been putting lots of effort in providing a high quality animation rendering. Although I only provide a relatively none contribution for the final production, I am still glad that I am involved in the initial stages of the development such as establishing the company, creating the marketing strategies, company logo, sketches and storyboard developments, characters and environment research and some others. I'm just hoping that next semester we will do a lot on individual work rather than a group one because there is a possibility that the amount of work are not equally divided. All in all, this project has become a success and I am just glad it has finished. Great work guys!

Final Individual Promotional Package..or was it preliminary?

Here is the complete set of the assignment 4 which is the promotional package that includes 3 posters, 3 production stills and a DVD cover.

aren't these pretty??

Long Overdue Lip Sync Tutorial

Sorry for the late update for this tutorial. I had actually forgotten to write this in blog until I saw it in my handbook. So here it goes..

- create new layer called audio in every window (scene, prof, prof head, mouth). Put it on the top.

- import audio file to stage

- click on first key frame, go to properties change the name -> filename.mov

- set it to stream (do these and one above on all layers)

- create another layer in prof head called dope sheet. Place it below audio layer.

- on every spoken action press F6 and name it as the word spoken in the audio. e.g vell, com

(purpose of this is to place the appropriate mouth action on each words spoken)

- click on mouth layer, hit keyframes on the frames that you enter the words before. e.g frame 145 in HULL, hit keyframe in frame 145 of mouth layer.

- then click on the mouth and change the mouth type in the looping tab.

- best technique is to do from closed to open mouth words. e.g M-> F -> O

I know that it doesn't make any sense my just reading these steps but this image will probably helps.

click here to view the output

experimenting with poster layout

Lately I have been busy with other assignments and I have forgotten to update the blog. During the past few weeks I managed to create one poster layout for the next assignment which is the promotional package. After consulting with Josh and Lisa, this layout will be a template for the other 2 posters where I will compose them as a long poster and just replacing the character with the female character and the two maggots. I still think the layout can be improved especially with the text composition or anything with the text but I could not figure out which part. Tell me what do you think about the layout.

and the DVD cover too!

This is one of the few DVD covers that I made and were picked for submission. Below are the others made in order.

*again credit to Saiful and Saifullah for the artwork

My Part for Assignment 3

For this assignment I was assigned to do the descriptions for everything relating to the animation such as the synopsis, characters, environments and profile. This is the synopsis for our animation, FISHING LOVE...

Going fishing on the weekend is one of Danny’s hobbies. He never had a partner in his life so by going fishing can make him forgot about loneliness in his life. One day he decided to go fishing at a jetty outside his town, which is unusual for him considering he has never gone fishing outside of his town. After a few hours, he still couldn’t get a single fish. He almost gave up but later he had an idea to attract fish to his bait, which is a maggot. He decided to dress and put some make up on the bait hoping that fish will fall to his trap. Little did he know the fishes were actually laughing at his maggot because it looks so funny to them. Suddenly a good looking male maggot came to her rescue. They both fall in love and hugged each other causing Danny’s rod started to shake. Danny pulled his rod thinking he caught a fish but is rod actually stuck with the other girl’s rod. They started staring at each other and fall in love at that moment.

Characters

Danny

Danny is a young boy living outside the city. He doesn’t have many friends as he would have liked which has troubled him all his life. The loneliness that he felt is unimaginable. He always thought that the way to reduce his loneliness is by eating an awful lot because he knows that no matter what he do or how he look like nobody will want to like him or be friend with him. Since he moved out to a new place he had picked up a new hobby which is fishing. Every weekend he has been going fishing with a small hope of making a new friend.

Becca

A country woman who still lives with her family in a small town. Since she was small she always followed her father everywhere he goes. Most of her father’s hobbies have become hers too and she still do some of them until now such as hunting, fishing and refurbishing the house. After completing her high school she had the opportunity to further her studies at a university in the city but she declined the offer to stay home and look after her aging parents.

Environment Design

Environment 1: Under Sea

Much inspired from the animation movie Finding Nemo. We try to make the background less empty with the addition of the ground with sea weeds and rocks to highlight the nature beauty of the deep sea whilst at the same time make it more liveable for marine living species.

Environment 2: Jetty

The most important background for this project. The idea of this background was inspired by the one in Derwent Water in North West England. We chose this location because it fits all the criteria that we need which are a scenery that is out of town with mountains at the back, has a wooden jetty, perfect nature views.

*credit to Saifullah and Saiful for producing such an excellent artwork. Keep it up guys!

Easter Break

Here comes an update from the director:

Every team member of Grand Line Pictures have been busy during this holiday period with their own task given by me. I also have my own task for this project even though my crucial part is not until the editing part but I have decided to contribute and help the team in order to reduce stress for them. I am now compiling all the wonderful animation works done by Saiful and Saifullah and preparing them all for the upcoming presentation. Now that the characters and environments design have been completed, I have been asked to writing all the descriptions and prepare for the verbal presentation. Although we are now a little bit behind our schedule I think we can manage to catch up before the school starts.

I give you..... GRAND LINE PICTURES™

After the announcement of the winning pitches, we have decided to collaborate and form a new group to conduct the animation process of Saifullah's winning pitch, FISHING LOVE. The new group consist of 4 studios which are Double Buzz Studio Production, Robowarrior Studio, Moonlit Night Studio and Yellow Heat Studio. Once the group was formed, we straight away work on the next task of completing the company profile.

These are the roles for each member:

Director: Saifullah and Faiz

Screenwriters: Saifullah and Saiful

Editor: Faiz

Art and Creative Director: Saiful

Animator: Chunyin and Saifullah

Marketing Director: Chunyin and Faiz

For a start, I have been assigned to create the logo for this company. You can see it at the top of this post. The logo was inspired by the new found hobby of our screenwriter Saifullah which is fishing, during our trip to Port Neill. It depicted few organic lines that forms the shape of a fish jumping out of water.

Next, I have been working with Chunyin to complete our company profile. Surprisingly we finished it only in a short period of time because we are very excited to be involved in this project.

At the moment I am in charge of handling tasks to the group members of what is expected in every deadline whilst also supervising their work to maintain its quality. This must be done in order for us to keep our progress ahead of the schedule. So far everyone has worked so hard in giving their thoughts and ideas to make the animation become great and far more interesting. While we still keeping the same storyboard, we have made few additions into the character design to bring in the comedy elements.

More ideas are starting to sparkle. In the meantime check out our draft animated logo in the company blog http://grandlinepictures.blogspot.com/

week 4: JINX Concept Pitch

Our first assignment of the semester was concept pitch. We were asked to create a storyboard for a short animation. I had an idea of doing a comedy genre for this animation about smoking.

Here is the synopsis of the pitch:

The day that every kid has always look for, the first day of high school. Charlie, a young country boy has been registered in a school in a metropolitan city. He has never in his whole life leaves his hometown. This is the first time Charlie been out of town or a journey on his own. He took a bus to school as early as 6 a.m. An hour and a half bus ride took him to the environment that he has never experience before. He takes a stop just nearby his new school. While walking there he looks at the surrounding and sees different kind of people to his hometown. The most noticeable differences are the attitude of his new schoolmates. They were all around the town running wild, with shirts unbutton and untagged and most importantly smoking cigarettes. He thought it was fine to smoke there because he had never in his life smoking cigarettes which make him thinking that it would make him look cool or un-nerd. The moment he starts smoking many unfortunate things happen every time he smokes. It was not long until it came across to his mind that he should not be smoking cigarettes and immediately quit.

I was hoping that it would get chosen because I had this feeling that I can get the best out of this animation to make people laugh at the skit. Unfortunately it didn't get picked in the top 10 winning pitches. It is probably because the length of this animation would take more time than required. Anyhow Saifullah's storyboard were chosen so it would be fun to have a go at his love story animation. We have also formed our company with me, Saifullah, Chunyin and Saiful as the members. I will talk about that in the next update.

Week 3: Kaiser Walk

This lesson is one of the easiest because we only need to link a few photos before we could move it. the character that we are using in this tutorial is the Kaiser. There are four different parts of the Kaiser that we have to link which is the head, hands, body and legs. First we have to distribute all 4 parts into 4 different layers and named them after its part. Second, we have to convert them into symbols and graphics so that the animation can be done. We have actually learned all of these in Imaging Our World during our first year so it was not that hard. This time we are using classic tween which will only require the original position and final position for animation. In this frames, we have to arrange the layers of body parts into a moving body posture to create a perfect moving animation. By using classic tween, we don't have to edit frame by frame as it will automatically complete movement in between.

Week 2: Animating a Character

The tutorial is starting to get interesting. Today we learned making movement of a character on flash. We made a character walking just like the ones we have seen on the other famous animations.

These are the four principles of walking:

1. Contact
2. Down
3. Passing
4. Up

These can be seen better if the animation is focus on the legs. if the legs is animated perfectly then all the other parts will have no trouble animating. For the other parts, all that we have to focus on is the posture of the movement such as its hands. Further explanation can be found in the animator's survival kit.

This is the one I did during tutorial. It was not so great but it explains. My apologies for the length of the video.

Week 1: The Very Beginning of Animation

The first week of classes was all about getting to know the major software that will be used to produce the 2D animation and that software is Adobe Flash CS4. Some students had already used Flash when we were doing Imaging Our World during the first year of university. So this class was for us to refresh back our memory of using Flash while some others who are new to it has to learn from basics. This also helps us anyway as we can also sharpen our own skills by learning new stuff from the tutor or other students.

The first class was about the introduction of tools and its functions and using those tools to create object that can be animated. The animation was then made by creating motion tween at selected frames timeline. It was very simple and straight forward to move the object horizontally and vertically.

After all the basic tools were covered in the first tutorial, the second one is slightly more advance. We get to learn how move objects in any directions, not just vertically and horizontally by using Guide function. Guide is created by creating a line of movement using Pen tool and link it with the object. The other thing that we learned in the tutorial was using the function of classic tween. these functions were then combined to create a short animation of bouncing balls. In order to make the bounce look realistic, the tutor then showed us the function of onion skin. the value of ease in or ease out or the timing of its movement can be set according to individual preference on how realistic the bounce should be.

my incomplete work of flash