For this assignment, we were given a piece of footage shot by our instructor and we then had to insert something into the footage as seamlessly as possible. For mine, I shot myself in front of a bluescreen and then inserted myself into the footage. I removed the blue background with chromakey, matched my colors with the footage, and then tracked myself using reference points in the footage.
Here's the leveling guide:
I think it was pretty successful, or at least as good as I could get it.
In case you're wondering what I was doing, my original plan was simply to stand in front of the blue screen and do nothing. However, one of my VL colleagues suggested to instead "rub my beard," so I did. Here's a pic:
For this assignment, we were to create a walk cycle of a character with a certain "attitude" that corresponded to a loop of music of our own choosing.
I chose "Black History Month," by Death From Above 1979. The loop of music isn't perfect, but the cycle's pretty consistent with the beat, which was important.
Final (inked) version of the Comical Strip. Big change in the 4th panel. Before it was a subtle change in the characters demeanor, more of a "lack of reaction" as the reaction. However, the instructor emphasized that the change in expression from one extreme ("high and happy" in the 2nd panel to "low and sad" in the 4th) would produce a more humorous effect.
In further deviations from our "The Chain" breakdown, we had to create the floorplan of the character Gold's house, and do the elevations for one room.
For "The Chain," we next had to "zoom in" on our map and create a layout of one of the characters' neighborhoods. Then, we were to show four views of the neighborhood from a ground-level perspective.
Our Visual Story assignments so far have been culminating to this: the Comical Strip. Having studied the visual language (ie, shots, pans, perspective, visual space, etc), we are to create a 4 panel strip using characters of our own design to craft a joke of sorts. I opted to use the ones I created for the class. Here's the rough draft (the final draft is due next week... he'll be critiquing these today):
For The Chain, we had to create a map that fully represents the story and all of the events that take place. A good starting off point is that a dog attack happens where a Colonial House stands n the fringes of a park. Therefore, the "Attack Site" is located close to the edge of a park.
Facial Animation assignment. From the characters we designed for Visual Storytelling, we were to choose one and animate that character going through a change of expression while dubbing it to sound. Originally, I was going to do my hero character. A peer of mine suggested doing the Old Man, but I was against it then. I thought having to animate the follow-through on the jowels would be too much. However, as soon as I drew the single frame for the Hero character, I realized how much more fun it would be to make the Old Man as jowelly as possible.
Sure enough, it was. I'm very happy with how it came out. I did thumbnails as a preview of the animation, then from the thumbnails I did the keys, then shot the keys. Once I viewed the keys, I in-betweened them and then shot those. After some tweaking, I cleaned up the keys and the in-betweens, shot the whole thing, and then synched up the sound using Final Cut Pro.
So far, it was my favorite animation to do. Took the least amount of paper, too! Only 20 frames!
Like the standard Disney animator test, we were to give a flour sack "life." However, our assignment differed in that whereas the Disney test asks for a walk cycle, ours was to make the Flour sack do a jump, all the while giving it thought and character in the process. I think I did fairly well. The only part that wasn't well received was the impact on the other side of the gap. If you compare it to my "Bouncing Ball" animation, the flour sack has no contact process; the flour sack is in the air one frame, and in the very next frame has been squashed on the ground, as opposed to making contact with the ground and then squishing. I thought leaving out the moment of contact and instead skipping to the flour sack at its most squashed state would make for a more jarring impact, but our instructor disagreed. Lesson learned.
On the bright side, everyone liked the "flailing kicks" at the end.
Teapot animation, due Sept. 20th. We had to either animate an egg cracking to reveal a surprise inside, or a teapot with a "mystery" effect. I waited too long on mine and the result is sloppy animation (quality of line especially). I resorted to using spirals for the effect, which certainly do their job, but certainly aren't very interesting.
Still, I chose the teapot because it seemed like the tougher of the two. And, I feel that I benefitted from it in the long run.
