New Layout!

I made a cooler layout for the blog! I was supposed to spend this time animating, but somehow I feel better after investing my time in making the film's blog a little cooler.


:) I'll just work extra hard in the next couple of hours.

EDIT Also, HERE is my revised ... Laika...leika... leika reel?

A Time for Change

I've found that one of the strangest things about making a film is that all the while you are learning new thing about the process and structure of filmmaking itself. Then again, I'm pretty sure that's the point of "Animation Projects". Since starting the winter semester, I've been taking Animation Concepts Lecture and Studio. Upon looking at some of the films and points in those classes and after doing some of the projects, it's made me look at Lovely School (LMSFLG was too long to type. :() in a different way. I'm going through my original storyboard and reworking a number of shots, such as the reveal shot of Alice and Dirk and more particularly the area around the big "Oh my gosh we're animals" reveal.

I'm also seriously considering reworking the ending, because story-wise it seems a little rushed and compressed. I feel like Mrs. Laidee (The principal) should show up sometime earlier. It's times like this that I wish I could extend my overall goal of the film being about 2 and a half minutes long, but somehow I feel like that would be cheating. So, I'm going to try to rely on background elements to tell parts of the story! Perhaps, in the hallway scene when Dirk's trying to subdue Alice, the regretfully empty hallway wall behind them could ... have the principal's office door on it. Or maybe a huge painting of her or something. I feel like I have to do something there though. There's a lot of empty space in both the film and the background. And rather than to put nothing or things not essential to the plot.. I'll put things... totally... essential to the plot.



Moving on, I've been fiddling around with the sound for the film. I'm not exactly musically inclined, but I have a little bit of experience with instruments. Mostly the piano and the flute (not so much). I do LISTEN to a lot of music at least, more specifically soundtracks to games, movies, tv shows and other things. Realistically, I don't think I'll be able to produce an epic musical score that will drive people to tears. But at least it will be a bare-bones something that will capture the mood I want for each segment. Perhaps during post-production I can take it to someone who knows a lot more about it than I do and they can at least know what kind of music I want. Or maybe this could be my chance to experiment. (I kinda did experiment in garage band and made this really weird... remixy... song... thing.)



I'm glad to see the film sort of coming together now. I'm not sure why, but at first I was super excited, during the middle I got a little frustrated and reluctant and nervous, but now I like the project a lot more again and I want it to become something awesome. At times I regretted picking this subject/plot/etc because for some reason I had this idea in my head that all student films had to be somewhat pretentious and deep and epic and stuff. Then I sort of realized that I liked this choice because I have always been a fan of cartoons, stories, comical silliness and things over all. I fell in love with animation and comic books when I was young, I still love them, and I hope that I'll forever love them and I want this project to remind me of that when I look back on it 20 years from now.


...


But what am I going to do for my Senior film?


....


D'oh. I'll worry about it later




[Revised Opening Shot Background]


In other news, I decided to switch image hosting sites. Imageshack, what I've been using previously, is nice and all but I learned it's not really all that great for archival's sake. Photobucket is a more reliable choice, I suppose.




Edit BLARG. I accidentally deleted the template I had made... Oh well, I guess this calls for a new (and probably better) one!

Another Update!

About time, huh? Figured I'd do it during class instead of taking a break.




The Scene where Dirk and Alice Enter the Bad Kids' Room

Admittedly, I got a little crazy with animating stuff here. Dirk's mouth is open kinda randomly so that I know where I'm putting the dialogue. Looking back on the scene I think I might go back and take out a few of Dirk's actions, since he's all... freaking out. Then again, that fits his reaction to all the information he is finding out.

Strangely, I think I like animating the Randomals (the name I am giving the collective of... well, random animal children. Randomals. Get it?) I have no idea how I'm going to clean up all of this, but I am glad with what's going on in the scene for the most part.


I also got the final scene's background done:




I tried to base the zoo off of a couple of pictures I found using Google Image Search:




The posters I more or less made up on the spot, but I tried to make them seem like convincing Zoo posters. You know, with pictures of animals doing cool stuff or in interesting poses... things the animals in the zoo rarely seem to do. Since they mostly sleep or eat or ignore your existence.

Still not entirely sure what I'm going to do with those big open green spaces. I might put some kind of shrubbery, maybe in the shape of zoo animals like in one of the pictures.



More updates are on the way, hopefully sometime this year!

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. >.<