A two minute animation? What was I thinking? In the end, I realize that I probably bit off way more than I could chew here– it would have been much better to make a really good 30-45 second animation (say, starting off when the envoys enter the tent). Even given this horrible miscalculation, animating it in chronological order on top of that just compounded it, since the last scene– the one that’s the most important thing to happen in the entire animation– was the one animated under the most severe time crunch.

I still kind of enjoy the sassy narration text, even if it didn’t really go over that well at the crit. If the animation itself had been better, it probably could have supported it. Spoken narration would have probably worked even better, but I feel like this animation would have to be narrated by a sixtysomething British guy for the full effect.

1. Assignment: Lip-syncing.

2. Total time to record and animate: 3 1/2 hours

3. Difficulties encountered: “Where do you think you’re going?” was delivered very fast, which is good characterization, but made keeping up with the sound shifts a bit difficult when animating on twos. “I love you” was just kind of a mess in general.

4. Aha moment: When I realized that I could use the gaps between the lines to continue to characterize the speaker through facial cues, rather than just having him sit there slack-jawed until he had something new to say.

1. Time to animate: 4 hours

2. Adjective Pair: Fearful and Fearless.

3. Backstory: Two spooky ghosts were told to wait at the misty mountains for a sign or portent. Little did they know that they’d learn the true meaning of fear.

4. Occasionally, when numerous elements were all moving around the screen independently (for example, the bit towards the end when the fearful ghost, the fearless ghost, and the ball ghost are all moving in different directions), it was was hard to keep track of everything. There are a handful of frames where one of the characters vanishes because of this.

5. Aha moment: While the timing isn’t perfect, it is a lot better than it’s been. The characters seem to actually take time to think over what they’re seeing and react accordingly, which was a flaw in past characterization animations.

1. Assignment: Walk Cycle

2. Animation Time: 4 hours, 5 hours, maybe more? Time has lost all meaning.

3. Problems encountered: Just making the walk cycle itself was far more time-consuming than I thought it would be, so the other stuff I had planned– having him come back the other way in a different mood (Dejected? Scared? There’s a lot that can be conveyed through a walking style), or have him stop in the middle and do something– fell by the wayside.

4. In spite of all of that, hitting play and seeing my little character stroll across the frame, looking just as jaunty as I’d hoped he would, was very satisfying.

5. Most of the problems resulted from sheer animation time, so there’s not much that would change if I animated this piece again. His arms are a bit crazier than they should be, I suppose.

1. Assignment: An animation which includes something we feel we need to work on- in my case, animating an on-model character.

2. Approximately 2 hours, 45 minutes to animate.

3. Problems: Even though I had a very simple character design, it was still more complicated than anything else I’ve animated– balls, pendulums, balls with squirrel tails, etc. I did a better job keeping her on model than I did with the squirrel ball, but she still fluctuates a bit in size in proportions. Flash was also very testy about exporting this properly, but I got it in the end.

4. Ah ha: Watching the animation, and seeing that I’d actually managed to convey a character with at least some sense of weight and motion, and not just a moving, fluctuating blobby thing like I was afraid I’d get.

5. If I could animate this again: I would have worked more on the last part, with the spaceship. The idea would come across better if the ship moved slower, hovering rather than zipping around.

6. REFLECT: While my character design was still basically just a ball with an eye and very simple hair, a trapezoid, and two little stubby feet, it was still more involved than any other element I’ve animated so far. I can see plenty of problems, but I feel like this was a real step forward for me.

1. Animation to Music

2. Time to Animate: 5 hours (including time wasted on a very simple problem with my audio file)

3. Problems: In general, I had a much easier time reading the music than I did in class last week, but the quieter beat that comes in near the end was hard to keep track of. I also made a few spurious marks on my timing sheet that, upon listening to the clip again, didn’t correspond to any unique sounds.

4. Ah Ha moment: It actually synced up to the sound! That was cool.

5. If I could do it again: I chose this fireworks concept on the basis that it’d be something simple to animate after the tough work of reading the music was taken care of. But the reading was a lot easier than I assumed it’d be, so the animation could have been something more complex, with actual physics to it.