journal entry

"I applied to SVA and couldn’t go, just like Harry couldn’t’ go to Hogwarts right away. That’s why I like the series so much, it reminds me of my optimistic side of seeing dragons and wizards everywhere."

- from my journal January 3, 2006.

some more tests

head moving down 

This is a test of Richard Williams' chapter on in-betweening. He was talking about the differences between straight in-betweening where a middle position is picked versus a more interesting in-between like having a person go to gasp slightly from a straight face into a frown rather than a straight into the frown from a straight face.  Ken Harris, one of the nine old men, would draw in-betweens that would favor one of the two extremes. In this case, my head tilts down, then forward (not the best animation, but...). Instead of moving from point A to B, the in-between gives what is normal a little more character. The idea is to use overlaps in the in-betweens. Have them work for the movement by directing the change in the drawing towards the breakdown positions. We all know we're going to get there, so we might as well throw old it back for as long as possible until we have to do it. Or we can so something else entirely before we get there. 

So this is the test with my character. First I decided on what I wanted my character to do: move his head down in a serious and heavy way. I decided to go with a 24 frame animation to make it easy on myself and picked 9 as the breakdown drawing. Then i did my charts, which you can see if you pause the video right at the beginning. The chart spans my 24 frames and shows the easing into and out of my breakdown position. Finally, I got to animating. I did a straight ahead from #1 - 9 easing into my breakpoint, another from #9-15 easing down towards my ending position, and another from #16-24 with even spacing. I worked on twos at first (every other drawing) and then went back to add in-betweens. I spend a lot of time afterwards cleaning up the eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth (half of my Calc class, actually). I still need to do hair, and was thinking of adding frames at the end to make him move forward more.  

Scene 02 - second rough pass

This is my second attempt at scene 02. This scene has 3 layers: one is the background, then the background birds, then the bird animation.

Here's another iteration of this scene. I added a flickering for the background birds (which took longer to do than animating the entire scene), and anticipation in the beginning before the bird arrives. 

Let me know what you think and what I could change. 

trapped in the system, Pigeons

cage sees and kicks a dead bird in the streets of new york @ :45 seconds.

Pixar and the Oscars playlist

I searched for pixar in the Oscars channel on YouTube. here's the playlist. They wouldn't let me embedd it (assholes.)

Ads and Stats

Added google ads. ... why not. In doign so, I had to open it up to become a searchable blog.

I also added Analytics: how.

Animation Supplied

I bought some supplies:

• Tombow Pencils
  


• COL-Erase Pencils (red)
• Round Beg Bar (5 set)



• Finch Animation Paper (1000 sheets)








• 12F lightbox

I intend to spend as much as I need to for this project, but I also have to keep in mind that I will be running through paper and pencils while learning. So the best quality paper and pencils are not warrented, but pencils don't cost too much, so I wanted to try them.

The colored COL-Erase pencils are special pencils that are easier to erase and write over. In animation red is for the construction of the line, blue is for a committed line (light blue for traces) and black for final commited lines. Other colors are sometimes used to designate other types of lines, such as purple for corrections to make it easier to clean up. A cornerstone of animation is to draw the same thing over and over, adding and refining in the process.

As for paper, I'm using a 12F paper, that's a little bigger than Xerox (8 1/2 x 11) paper and is more animator friendly. They go for about $35 for 1000 sheets + shipping. Good paper is about $75, and pro (Pixar-Disney) quality ranges from $100-400/1000 sheets based on the size. I'm getting this from animationsupplies.com which does round hole punching. That means i can use a normal hole puncher on regular paper if i run out of animation paper. They did advise against buying prepunched paper Xerox paper, as the punches are a little too big.

As for the lightbox, I wish I had a giant one, but this will do for now. It can sit beside my small wacom tablet.