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