Stopping Motion

Well my action analysis is actually still at the school so that's not going up this weekend. However I did discover I had the frames with me from my Stop Motion assignment we did this week, so you're getting that instead!



While I don't intend to go into stop motion (I like the forgiving nature of computer 3D much better) I am having lots of fun with the class, and I can feel how handling these puppets relates with handling a digital rig. The program we use in class is VERY limited as far as editing goes, pretty much if there's something wrong with a frame you can either delete it and hope everything else matches up, or delete it and EVERYTHING else afterwards. You can't insert frames made afterwards into a previous space.

Didn't really need to do anything crazy to fix this up. There were 2 frames during the anticipation right before the 1st swing which were slowing down the movement far too much, so I just removed them. I was going for an effect like he had real trouble swinging forward the first time he brought the club behind his head, but after I shot it it didn't really work, so I edited it to be a more straight-forward swing. I made a double swing because I felt I needed to put more energy in after the 1st still. Also, the ending is a little abrupt, needs about 2 more frames of ease-in, but too late to fix now.

Unrelated, you've probably heard about Minecraft by now, and if you haven't, well, uh, now you have. I started playing it back in July and I've built a fairly extensive castle by this point. I've been using it as inspiration for drawing landscapes, buildings, and creatures lately. I did a bunch of sketches of the monsters and this weekend I caved-in (spelunked) and scanned them so I could paint them. Here's the 3 I got so far:

1st one is actually one I made up for the game, I just call it 'cave beast' and while it might not be implemented by Notch (the Minecraft creator's alias) I hope someday I'll be able to mod it in. In the middle we have the Creeper, the exploding enemy, and the last one is the new zombie pigman found in 'The Nether', complete with golden sword! Obviously these guys will never appear in-game with this much detail, but like old games the concept art exceeding the in-game graphics has it's own charm. Something I like about Minecraft, the limited graphics (to compensate for infinite manipulability) make everything sort of iconic, like how I used to make the starship Enterprise out of 5 square LEGO bricks. And it entertained me for years.

Animals and News

Well the group film is on it's way, we have the rough storyboards and will have more finalized boards by next week. We've got a great and funny story and everyone is on-board for it, so that's going swell. I've been placed as 'layout manager', which means it's my job to make sure the layouts are getting proper attention, and help everyone produce them. Of course everyone helps with every part of the process, but we each have a specific focus as well.

Layout and Storyboard class are both completely focused on the film right now. For animation class, I've got some key poses and backgrounds that I'll put up very soon. Meanwhile we went to the Royal Winter Fair, again, today so I've got studies from that. As well we're doing a small anatomy study project, and I'll have that up once I take a picture of it.

Meanwhile, here's my animal work from the fair. I started off with some pen gestures, went back to pencil for some structure practice but then I moved to markers. I had a lot of fun blocking in the basic shade and color with marker, then finished each drawing with pen contours on top of the block in. Definately gonna keep trying this, it's much better than doing a line drawing and then colouring in Photoshop afterwards:

I'll note the colours aren't quite right due to the scan, but since it's not an attempt to get exact color it's not a huge deal.