A Bizarre Issue

Firstly, I'm posting on my blog for the first time ever with my feet Mac! It's so clean and new and fancy. It even still smells new. ...I'm not weird! I've been wanting to post a new little piece of animation I've done but have run into a bit of an odd issue. Perhaps someone can help me with this. On Adobe Photoshop CS5, using the timeline to animate, and I've gotten this oddness:

Now, most of the animation is in 2s, and you can see most of the lower layers are all in line. One stops being displayed at exactly the point at which the next starts. Then at layer 56, for some reason, the images stopped letting me change their... display bars? To be 2 frames long. No no, they want to be about 1 and a half frames long. I don't know how or why they're 1 and a half frames long but no matter what I do I can't seem to fix it. I can't align them properly and it makes the timing look odd. I know at one point I realised the framerate was 30 fps and changed it to 25 fps, but surely that wouldn't matter? If anyone can help me with this I'd really appreciate it. Even Dave looked confused. No luck when googling the issue either.

 I might upload the animation I was doing later anyway, even missing these dodgy frames. As for my current targets... polish up portfolio, finish portfolio commentary, and then blast the handin with every single piece of artwork I can find that doesn't induce vomiting. Sounds like a plan to me!

 I'm really not this negative in person. It's the evils of Blogger getting in my head. Honest!

I Need a Brain

Brains are important for cognitive function. I need to buy one. I'll try eBay. So, a quick update at long last (again) just gonna really quickly plonk some animation I've done in here. I'm really going to have to focus on my portfolio, I haven't finished my commentary for that yet. So real quickly: Here's a little runthrough of animation I'm more or less happy with, in order. Obviously tweaks and things like camera shakes need to be added, as well as colouring. I'm thinking of changing Okri's colour to be warm, perhaps a yellow. The following is bits that either aren't in order or that I'm not including (the last few clips are essentially waste. It's animator poop.)

Believe it or Not...

I am actually alive! Back from Berlin, finally got around to updating. Had an absolutely great time and I will say this: Berlin is a nice city, especially for a capital. Compared with London... yeeeeah. In London you get to be a sardine in one of the ugliest, most densely-packed, polluted and miserable cities I've ever had the displeasure of visiting. Berlin was much more pleasant -not as clean from what I could tell, as far as litter goes- but a lot more spaced out. It was artier, more free, more relaxed, more happy and though it kind of smelt of sewers a lot of the time I'd take that over London's smog any day. So yeah, I was quite surprised in that sense. It still doesn't quite beat good old Newcastle, but I'm probably bias. The festival itself was brilliant too; I sat in and watched most of the speakers and the screenings were fantastic for the most part. I think there were a few animations that a lot of people I talked to weren't too keen on, but overall they were great. I'll look at them in a bit more detail later *cough*whenIcanbearsed*cough*. For now, I actually have... Wait for it... ... Waaaait for it... SOMETHING TO SHOW.

Hehe, I love google. Anyway First actually coloured sequence from my animation; it's a scene in which Okri uses one of Ralla'ool's feathers to start a fire. I added a little glow in after effects.

Yeah, it's Been a While... Also, Sadface.

Okayokay. I didn't update for a bit. And you'll find that once again this will be more of the same.

Y'see, things have been very mad lately. I just can't seem to get my head around everything. With easter coming though that should give me a bit of time to fully organise myself and get everything up on here.

There is a bit of news, but its not good news. I spent a very large amount of money on a computer a while ago; I can't remember if I mentioned it on here, nor can I be bothered to check. But this computer was a very powerful heavy-duty thing and... its dying. The computer itself is okay, but a little while ago I began to notice some slightly odd things going on; odd popups opening in new windows when clicking on a site sometimes (and it doesn't matter whether I was actually clicking anything: a linkless border or actual links, no matter how official the site... popups). I stupidly put it down to my new version of Firefox being crap. I installed Adblocker and thought nothing of it.

Until yesterday when I turned it on to do a bit of work. It was fine at first, but then things started becoming slower. Internet pages first. Then it began to load more slowly. I scanned, it found nothing, but continued to become increasingly unresponsive. Well you can imagine my horror. All my stuff's on there! (and this, kiddies, is why backing up your data is vital!)

Well at this very moment its been left on safe mode with programmes running to try and bring it back to life. It's got Malwarebytes, Avast, SuperAntiSpyware and one I think is called Adware(?) taking turns to try and beat the issues out of it. Also use Rkill (stops viruses from operating) and CCleaner (I think it sorts the computer's registry) on it now too. I find it curious... my oldest computer had Avast. No problems. My old iMedia had Avast. No problems. My sister's two laptops had Avast. No problems. My mam's old computer had Norton. It had viruses. My new computer had Norton, and now its got viruses... pattern?

So hopefully I can get rid of the issues without resorting to a wipe. But if a wipe is needed... well it'll at least save my computer I suppose. It's gotten worse with every reboot, getting slower and now it refuses to connect to the internet (even though Avast's started behaving oddly and trying to get me to connect to unknown networks... I find it all a bit strange). Once its sorted, I'll be able to start uploading again. I make a point of not using my memory stick when its been used with a computer I know is infected so I quite literally have nothing. I'm empty handed and sad and... Geez I hope I don't lose too much stuff.

Yeah, Been a While...

And that's very much because I've just being doing the same thing continuously. I probably mentioned at least once in an earlier post what the game plan is: I sketch out every major scene in rough, line test it all, then colour those main scenes. Once I have that done wait, my last post was February?! Oh geez... okay, I'm going to start blogging. Every day. Just joked to my friend that I'm going to post a blog about every daily movement to make sure I don't let my posts slip. WHO'S INTERESTED IN EATING SANDWICHES? No one? Well poo.

Anyway, once I have that done, then I'll go back and put in the little niggly bits, depending on how much spare time I have. So basically, I'm doing exactly the same thing I've been doing since I last said I would be doing what I'm doing. I'll probably update this post later today to show a bit of what I'm happy with so far. I also have self-branding to finish (yes, I haven't actually finished that yet. I can't help it; I find branding hard to get just right). AND, I did say a while back that I was going to make myself upload my more personal projects and I'll get to that. ...soon. There's also a 3D model to make for the figurine, and 3D practice models I've been roughing out myself and the 3D mask for Varquer'eel to wear. Besides that, there's really just my own worldbuilding and character/species designs (I've also begun working on some clothing and armour designs for said species. Yay, I'm a fashion designer! :D ) and I've been looking into machinima again, but that's just for fun. Still, its timing and composition I guess.

My most recent issue with my animation is trying to figure out a way to get a background which is keyframed to move (hence moving it in 1s) and the drawn character frames to move slowly (in 2s) without a) the shot looking odd or b) having to draw what I can shoot in 2s, in 1s. So there's possibly a bit of problem solving to do on that one. ...Or just a load of drawing.

And that's about it. I have to remember to update more regularly. I should be back to edit this later on today. If I can, I'll get some clips uploaded. 'Til then!

Placeholder Posts (Platonicerific Primative... P'Free)

DON'T QUESTION MY MAGNIFICENT SKILLS OF ALLITERATION, DAMMIT.

Well, it's been another week already. Joy!

Basically it's been a week of more or less struggling with a single scene. Yes. One. Single. Scene. Because being the cleverclogs I am I decided to have a character raise its head, camera panning with it, and then do this really dodgy head turn which probably would look really impressive if I had the skill to pull it off (Read: I don't). So because of that I've let myself fall behind again... not good. I'm putting that scene to one side and moving onto easier scenes, needless to say. I can cut it if I don't have time at the end. Also, I forgot my memory stick today so I can't show you what we've been up to in Cinema 4D (go figure), but it's basically taking a photograph and building objects which it is projected onto; makes it 3D and camera pans around it look badass. Well, not my one, but Paul's looked badass. I'm actually quite excited about getting it down because my remake(/completion?) of my Nidhogg and the Eagle could really make use of it.

Dave approached us the other day two and he has an idea for our portfolios that sounds pretty exciting too - make a character in digital 3D which'll then be made into a figure. With moving joints. MOVING JOINTS. That's awesome! I'm hoping I can get a figure of one of my personal characters since it seems to be an extra-curricular thing, and because they're more interesting than my course characters, which is pretty sad really. Try as hard as I might, I just can't design characters quite as freely as my own projects. Trying to cling onto ideas I like for personal use probably has something to do with it.

Geez, I'm so scatterbrained today. I'm just sort of oogling this blog post, racking my brains for something to do or talk about. I want my computer. And my software, and my tablet. And coffee. I'd love coffee. And my memory stick. Also, coffee.

Mmm. Coffee gooooood.

Platonicerific Primitives!

So, yeah, I actually forgot to update. Until today. Yeah. Are you really surprised?

There's nothing really of note that can be said of my work, really; just the same thing I've been doing but... more of it. And it'll probably be that way for a while. I've more or less knocked up a (rubbish) animatic for timing but I'll upload it when it's fully finished... I'm not spending 5+ hours uploading an unfinished version. At the same time, I've started animating scenes that are finalised, but the same applies for them. They need more cleaning up before I'll invest hours of time into uploading them.

Kind of makes me wonder if the hours upon hours time to upload to Youtube is normal... more video compression obviously needed! Compression. It's your friend.

I've also found out the date for my interview for my 3rd year at college - I have until the 8th of May so I'll need a portfolio prepared for that. Urk. I hate interviews.

Also I was meant to talk about my personal projects a little while ago... I will. Sometime.

Also, exploding laptops, phones and planets in Cinema 4D!

So a little explosion we made in Cinema 4D. It was actually pretty easy to make; just knock up the models which were simple as anything (the laptop is literally two rectangles), triangulating them and then sticking them inside an explosion tag.

This one's the same sort of idea, but we used emitters to provide the rocks, which are really just textureless... whataretheycalled... platonic. Things. Platonicerific primatives.

Platonicerific primitives provide perfect planetary 'plosions!

Yeah, I couldn't resist.