Category Archives: Process
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.
REVISITING 3D
work work workin’ on that freelance I can’t talk about.
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?
SC_06 – TOTALLY DONE
Scene 06 has really minimal animation- so I was able to push it to completion in 2 days. I tried to hide an easter egg in the background of this shot. One for my brother’s beer brand and one for my composer Waylon Thornton:
BUT- the background was too complicated for a 2.75 second shot – so I had to put everything out of focus. So it’s a really, really hard to find easter egg.
Here’s a seagull that I animated from Scene 08. It’s 1 seagull out of about 14. Scene 08 is a nightmare.
I’m still struggling to figure out the solution to the film grain texture I like, as well as the color balance for this scene. Generally- I’m trying to work and draw outside of thesis every day- but I find that it’s confusing me. I’ve never worked on something for a year long- I’m worried that in 6 months I’m going to finally have honed down the look of this thing, and I’m going to have to go back and re-do a ton of scenes. BUT, I guess it makes no sense to worry about that now.
IT ONLY MAKES SENSE TO WORK.