Drowning in Assets...

We're supposed to be over half way through the creation of the artwork for our cutout animation.  That statement right there makes me cringe.  I feel like I've been working like a horse but I only have what is essentially one picture to show for it.  How does this take so long?  I've been using free textures and everything.  Bah.

The bright side is, it's the main background for the animation and according to Paul I can just reuse it (Sudo 3D is apparently very canny for letting you do that - so the scenes where the camera is supposed to pan up the tree at various angles won't need to be redrawn like they would in normal cutout animation).  Will likely save me a lot of time.  So now I can focus on the characters themselves, which should be much faster.

I also still have a lot of research that wants sorting out, but that'll have to be done at the same time.  What a pain.

Timetable for this week:
Monday: Assets and/or research
Tuesday: Assets and/or research
Wednesday: Assets and/or research
Thursday: Assets and/or research
Friday: Assets and/or research
Saturday: Assets and/or research
Sunday: Assets and/or research

Aaaah... the delight of a varied week.  I really have nothing else I can achieve if I'm going to be spending all my time doing more artwork... and I'm quite sure I will spend ALL week on artwork.  So redraw and texture chopped up versions of characters.  That should keep me busy enough.  And if I have time to spare, I'll finish up my research on cutout (pretty it up basically) and get my artist research again.

Now, we've been looking at more animations and though there are 15 in total, of those I can find I only really like this one:



It's 'Learn Self Defence' by Chris Harding.  Mostly I liked it for its humour and that it was very easy to follow the simple narrative, it wasn't overpowering. It just strikes a nice balance between being interesting but not so interesting it becomes confusing.



For comparison, 'Mr.Wizard - The Legend of Speed' was very expressive, but I completely lost what was meant to be going on midway through because the whole thing became too busy and chaotic.  Which was probably exactly what the animators were going for, but it didn't really work for me.



Saiman Chow's 'Oggo' sort of managed to tell a story without being overpoweringly chaotic as well, though I attribute that mostly to the fact that the characters are very simple by design.  I don't know if it was entirely intentional, but I think Oggo works because it still obeys the principle of staging whereas Mr.Wizard... doesn't so much.

On a side note, I ran into this animation for the Olympics 2008 while I was searching:

BBC OLYMPICS ©2008 Passion Pictures from Stephane coedel on Vimeo.

I really liked this one.  The characters sort of had a Gorillaz-esque appeal which made them expressive but almost flawed while doing it, which is just something I find makes characters likeable.  The animation is really nice too - it sort of has the clean look of cutout but the fluidity of traditional animation.    
Kinda makes me wonder whether it's cleverly drawn traditional or if they used mixed media for it?

Hello! (Typical Title is Typical)

I really should have done this earlier but I dunno.  I can never think of anything to say when I initially join a new site -- moreso when you're doing it for class, and you basically have no idea how formal you need to be.  So I've decided to throw formality in a box, put that box in a bigger box, then put THAT box in an even bigger box, then whack it with a hammer.  If anyone knows what film I just referenced, you get a cookie!

Soo.  I'm Rachel, a student from Newcastle College currently studying animation.  I've never actually had a blog before, unless deviantART-type things count, so I'm a serial waffler.  And you know, right now, I have this bizarre urge to animate something, but I should really be working on my artwork because apparently, come Thursday, we're going to be putting it all together in Cinema 4D.  Not something I can say I'm looking forward to... last time I tried to use it, I achieved nothing but make a very bad looking cityscape and make a monkey spin around uncontrollably at high speed in highly unpredictable patterns.  It's early days, though, I suppose.

What I'm wondering is if Blender would support the same type of useage... I think the general idea is that you take a picture and a silhouette of the same thing and apply it as a texture to a flat plane.  In Cinema 4D as far as I can tell it's a matter of importing, clicking and dragging, but Blender has this whole texture-baking malarky that I don't understand in the slightest yet.  Ah well.

I was also told to make a little list of what I'm supposed to be doing this week, so I'll do that too.

-Monday: Day I was (supposed) to update my blog.  However, I chickened away from both it and those Macs repeatedly (darn those Macs!) so I didn't...
-Tuesday: Blog's been updated!  Now I just need to learn how to upload my stuff so far, and gather a few different examples of work.  I'll see to those tomorrow, though, my artwork's needing to be done today.  Found a fantastic site stuffed with free-to-use textures though, which'll save me a lot of time!  I redesigned the main set for my animation as well (I thought if I'm going to be messing with all the images anyway, I might aswell) which should let me chop it up better and when it comes to animating, I should be able to get a better sense of depth.  Hopefully!
-Wednesday: Continuation with artwork, and I'll tend to this thing more.  Next week I'll just do it all on Monday though.  If I get everything polished up before the end of the day, I'll invest some time into finalising that research that's still dotted around everywhere.  I'm just so aweful at research.
-Thurday: Have to have everything polished up, we're being taught more Cinema 4D and as far as I'm aware we'll be sticking the whole thing together.

Tatty bye!