Hopefully this new colour scheme (which includes ELECTRIC yellows and ENERGIZING oranges) will encourage me to make more blog posts

Of course this isn’t the final theme of the site, but it will do until I have time to make a proper one.

Also this site will become less of a professional portfolio and more of a personal space. I’ll start showing more of my art work and animation on top of my graphic design, which I’ve gradually been moving away from since starting the uni course.

In the end, in a moment of true Chinese wisdom, I realised that it wasn’t the method that had me stuck, but the actual idea for the animation! All along I had these ideas in my head:

The tune is actually quite a sweet, flowing piece of music. Good to animate some sort of love story!

I did the best I could with what time I had left. The animation is lacking, but I made up for it with some nice use of colour (a requirement of the assingment) Unfortunately I didn’t actually manage to finish the whole thing, but I got far enough. What was eventually supposed to happen was a Mario-style rescue of Prince Peach from the hands of Bowser!

It seems impossible for me to convert the flash file into a video format, so here are screengrabs instead.

I’ve been going through the motions of figuring out what medium(s) I’ll be using and how to go about the work.

One of my tests have been with Photoshop’s animation functions and a wacom tablet.

The idea behind this 6 seconds of animation is that the music is reminiscent of a sort James Bond spy track with the quick drumming. What you see here is a somewhat realistic movement of each of four limbs in a run cycle, with 20 unique frames. The ninja is moving in a bowed down posture and going fast enough to kind of bounce off the ground as he’s running.

Of course there is a lot to improve in terms of keeping the volume of each part of the body the same. It’s very difficult to keep how the character looks constant

I will make another post soon with a quick tutorial on how to use Photoshop for animation.

This is one of six different music tracks I could choose to make a music video of.

I’m finding it insanely hard.

Let’s go through my usual hoops of making a project.

1. Receive brief. Yay! this sounds fun.
2. Make first notes on what to do.
3. Procrastinate for a while.
4. Suddenly get a load of different ideas.
5. Become spoilt for choice on ideas.
6. Suddenly decide I just need to do it.

I’ve just reached phase 6, and I need to show something substantial on Monday. Grim times.

Basically I could just hand draw the animation, but it would take an incomprehensible amount of time (see this post) to make over 2 minutes of animation. So what I’ve decided to do is use mostly Flash. Back in the day when I was 14 when my brain was like a sponge, I could learn new programs quite easily. Now it’s a different story!

Wish me luck.

Yeah my creative mind is a just a tad disturbed sometimes.

This 22 second short took an awful 10 hours to make. HOW?! you may ask. Well I had to make 120 drawings, and along the way I had to figure everything out. When animating characters, you have to think about how he walks – and this may be affected by the character’s mood, intentions and yes – weight. In this piece, you also see him running from a far distance, to being right up close to the theoretical camera. Other actions, such as the lifting of the endless flab and falling through the floor were also great challenges.

A little technical note – the video runs at 24 fps, but each frame that I drew was doubled (so in fact I drew 12 frames for each second). On top of that, I also repeated some parts. E.g. the hand at the beginning waves a couple of times, but I only drew it waving once. So all in all, I had only drawn about 10 seconds of animation. That’s nearly 10 hours to make 10 seconds of animation. Wow.

I’m going to call it a journal though. I always thought “blog” sounded very strange. In fact, one day I may even go up to whomever coined the word and give them a little slap

This journal will follow my progression through university. I’ll talk about the successes and hardships of doing an animation degree. I’ll try to keep this side of the writing quite intellectual; maybe discuss why my method is simply better than everything else. I jest, I jest.

On the other side, I’ll talk about some things more related to my personal life and also throw in a few reviews about new gadgets, movies or anything else.

How does that sound?