Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is always the busiest time of the year (save for finals), but I think everything is falling in place. I decided to get most of my cooking done sort of early, though there's still more to do. (Not to mention having to take 3 hours out of my day to go to Film class. It was interesting though--saw a Michael Moore movie and started analyzing it.)

Anyway, I do have a few things to report:

I started another "scene chunk", which you guys might have seen me working on in class on Monday; the scene where Dirk and Alice crash into a room, though each in their own special way. I had a little trouble with the door, since I decided (for some crazy reason) to do a shape tween. At least I got everything working properly, thanks to things called Shape hints. They're kind of easy once you get into the process.

Another problem I ran into was thinking about how Dirk would land in the room, since in the scene before he is tackling Alice off screen left. Well, they came in from the center before so I adjusted him to come in a little center-left ish. What's really weird is that I made Alice super-flip into the room and kind of sit down. Which I thought was dumb at first, but looking back on it it seems very Alice-like.

I left the file at school on the computer in 008 for some reason (I probably put it on my flash drive but I can't seem to find it at the moment), but I'll just upload it here when I have access to it again.






In other news, I decided to change uniform colors again, thanks to the suggestions in class last week, about the uniforms taking on a reddish tone.

XD Mostly, this post is because I suddenly remembered that Josh said to post Wednesday (see dates help!) and wanted to stay true to my promise to. I'll try to upload stuff early tomorrow hopefully, if I'm not swept up in Thanksgiving stuffs! I think I'm doing pretty OK now for a girl working in flash when her Flash trial expired. XD I still have a REALLY old version of flash, some Macromedia something, though I'm thinking there will be compatibility issues/frustrations. Either way, I'll get through it.

We'll get through it. Me, Dirk and Alice.

...


Thanksgiving is making me crazy... THANKS, GIVING! My gift this year is insanity! xD

Final Character Designs

Since I'm becoming more accustomed to the story and the concept, I've been looking back on my previous character designs and decided to change them just a little. They come off looking sort of pudgy, but in the animation they're a little narrower which I think I like.

BTW, here's the initial PDF I made, full of initial sketches and sort and stuff. :3

Initial PDF

Presentation!?

So, it's presentation day, hooray! Well, sort of yay. Collecting all my things together is sort of fun.


Here are some of the rough things I have been working on! I find that jumping around in the film when I work on it helps me to get things done a little better.

Silent Animatic

The animatic I am basing my rough off of, minus sound. Still working that out... >.> I think I'm honestly a little intimidated by the aspect of sound since all of my endeavors with it since starting at CCS have been kind of bad. I keep trying to take Sound Design class but it keeps conflicting with my schedule and things I really really need to take. x_x Blah.


ROUGH SCENE #1

Near the beginning, when Dirk and Alice are looking at some of the "perfect-ified" children. XD I wasn't going to make the little girl in the middle look all disturbed and stuff, but in the end I thought it looked better. There is actually a bit more to this scene than where it ended, more of a sight gag sort of thing that you see before the next scene where Dirk and Alice are walking down the hall, but I am debating about omitting it or not.


ROUGH SCENE #2


Thanks goes out to Christina here for helping me think about how Dirk moves; decided to take inspiration from the hackney horse she showed me. They have a cool way of moving that I could see a T-rex doing. I was going to go with the more obvious chicken movement, but thought that was kinda boring. That big curly thing on the left side of the screen is supposed to be the hall monitor polishing a picture frame (though it kinda looks like a blackboard or a really lame and uncreative plaque without the picture in it. Not really sure what to put in the frame there. I thought about putting a sight gag of some sort, like a picture of someone or something really weird but thought that might distract from the action. And uh, yeah, that guy is supposed to be there... the sliding one. He must have anatomy like butter or jello or something. And he must be really patient and tolerant; I think I'd be pretty miffed if someone chuck/pushed me down a hall.

On an unrelated note, no, the hall monitor didn't get fired. :3 You can see he tried to do his job, but honestly who can fight a T-Rex!?


ROUGH SCENE #3

This is affectionately called (for the moment) the YAY scene. Can you guess what they're saying? That's right! "Faygo!" ... No. They're saying Yay. Really they are! Who wouldn't be happy when a magician/principal/lady announces that she'll turn a bunch of animal children back into... human children? More or less half done; there is still a bit more to the scene (the lady pointing at the rhino), and I have to put the background in.


That's what I have in terms of animation so far. :O

Background Work and Keys!

Lately I've been dividing up the work, between working on backgrounds and putting in keys and stuff. Here are a few of my more finished backgrounds!







Neat, huh!? ... Still trying to figure out the whole "flash messing up quicktime exports" thingie, but at least I figured out how to fix flash exporting stills all weird. I didn't really use much reference for the interior of the school, but I did base the school colors off of the uniform I was forced to encouraged to wear in High School. Though, instead of the reddish color shown, we had to wear... *shudders* burgundy. And they were mean about it too. Wear dark red or brown and it was like you came in wearing a sky blue tank-top with flashing lights and lasers spelling out 'Suspend Me'. ... Gotta love school systems, right? Focusing on what's important? .... Where was I?



Typing on blogs is kinda weird for me at the moment, so I'm a little lacking on what to say... I'm sure it'll pass.



EDIT: I thought the default blog layout thing was kind of bland, so I went ahead and slapped something together in photoshop for a background. Both the page's background and the content's background were made by me, though the coding and other such things are still the same. I miss making webpages... Just not used to blogs. >.<

Creation!

And so the blog was created!

This blog will chronicle the creation of the Lovely Middle School for Ladies and Gents, a film to be produced by me, Jayna Shropshire. In the span of a year! Woo hoo!