Category Archives: Palm Rot (thesis)
RENDER CRISIS
Rendering at 25% quality makes me wonder if I should have done my entire thesis pixel-art style. Here’s some more process stuff (color correcting) and happy-accidents:
ANOTHER GIF AND TOO MUCH WRITING
All the freelance is over, but this critical studies class I’m taking has replaced it in terms of stress inducing time consumption. Luckily I’m taking the class with my other animators, so I get to study-with/look-at them. The midterm was on Monday, and I’m scrambling right now to catch up on Thesis. I’ve finally finally finally gotten to the first scene with a beetle:
I wanted to visually separate the beetles from the rest of the film as soon as they’re introduced. The first step of that is animating them differently, but I was having trouble breaking away from the sort of stiff character animation I’ve been doing for 4 months. So I went back and pulled frames from this old puddy test I did last year.
Here are s’more stills from this week’s scenes:
My next goal is to get on this Inktober truck that Jesse‘s on, making an ink drawing every day in October. If I can manage to keep up my drawing outside of thesis, I think I can avoid the otherwise inevitable relearning-how-to-draw-for-fun phase that has plagued me after every production thus far. I’m already 10 days behind, but I figure the busier I am, the less time I’ll spend dicking around on the internet.
PLUNGING FORWARD
Just finished scene 14, if I can kill scene 15 tomorrow and Sunday I’ll be back on schedule. Almost 25% through production on this behemoth!
RETROACTIVE MISCELLANIA
I animated that bad boy without planning my spacing, and without reference. Either making crates bob violently in water is EASY, or I have a knack for crate bobbing. (It’s easy.)
Smoke, on other hand, I have no knack for. Turns out I really suck at it, actually. I broke down this tiny portion from the Cowboy Bebop intro frame by frame:
From 10s to 13s. I actually copied the frames almost exactly, but it didn’t work out. This is the way animation has worked for me so far, sometimes shots just make sense, and other times it’s like hammering a rock. But I didn’t get frustrated- because for the last 12 days, this was my view while I was animating:
Spent the last week and a half in North Carolina, where I discovered how good iphones are at taking macro-photography. That’s my segue into posting a bunch of pictures of bugs:
This beetle hissed. Those fan antennae were blowing my mind.
And the last two images I have no segue for. One is another photo of that cloud floor I just posted a video of, and the other is a graph I found online a couple of months ago. It’s just burning a hole on my desktop and I don’t know what to do with it, but I really like those stars all over it. So it just goes on the blog for now.
Those stars are great, right?