Umbrella girl

Umbrella girl! I did something over the winter break. This was fun to do.

old schtuff

I rigged and animated this little guy in fall quarter and I almost forgot about it.

I'm back!

Just some stuff I've been doing outside of class

The animation process

so I am supposed to explain my process of making my film. Well, let's see, first off I did not use key frame animation, I used the puppet technique to animate everything. I had a LOT of symbols, let me tell you... it got a little confusing after a while trying to keep everything organized. To make sure that everything was consistent, I made one symbol where it had every body part together so I knew what it would look like once I dragged it on the screen. I did my backgrounds in photoshop, and I wanted to do my characters that way too, but they looked so choppy and messy that I decided to forgot all that hassle and just do the rest in flash. I re-used some animation, especially the rabbit's jumping cycle, as well as the girl. I had two running cycles made for Sophie and I didn't really like the second one so I mainly used the first one. I didn't want my backgrounds to be super complex because I thought that would take away from the two characters, so I kept things simple. This is the longest animated anything I've done, and I'm really happy with it. I think we all did a great job. There's some real talented people here, let me tell ya :)

Sophie and the Rabbit

Here's my short movie, Sophie and the Rabbit! I hope you like it :)

update

Oops. I forgot to post my schedule on here when I was supposed to. No worries...I have it here.

February 5th-8th: develop animatic

February 9th-15th: create backgrounds
start making character puppets

February 16-22: color backgrounds

Feb 23-March 1: start animating

March 2-8: tweak little problems

March 9-11: final editing, add music


Turns out I'm a bit ahead of schedule, since I've finished my project earlier this morning. I will post my movie later in the day.

looky here

Here is a little preview of one of my scenes. It's right after the little girl paints a picture of the rabbit on a piece of paper. Then it springs to life!





All in all, I'm quite enjoying this project though I do feel crunched for time. I have a few more scenes to do, so as long as I work on it everyday I think I'll be in good shape.

Miles to go before I sleep

Ok! So far, I have a minute and 20 seconds on my film. That means I'm about half way done. I found some good music (thanks to my roommate) and I'm just trying to get as much stuff done as I possibly can. It's going to be a long 2 weeks. Thankfully my other classes aren't as stressful. Hang in there, everyone! We're almost there! :)

so far so good

Coming along in my animation. I've been able to finish a scene every other day so I guess that's good, right?

animating

Horray, I've started animating! I just got to keep on track and stay on schedule. I'm starting to realize that I much rather work on this than do anything else in my other classes.

I still feel icky, and that's putting a damper on everything. If one more person tells me to drink OJ I am going to flip. I get it already... vitamin C = good.

That is all, good day to you.

animatic

Here is my extremely fast animatic. The final will look...a lot better than this



.

Work in progress

I've now finished my backgrounds, and I will start working on the characters...They will probably take me forever. Still working on the animatic too, so just hold tight. But for now, here are a few shots of my backgrounds.






I wanted to switch the background colors just to liven it up a bit. At first I was going to have the walls all yellow, but I decided to go with 3 colors that would switch back and forth- yellow, green and pink. The Garfield comic strip tends to do that sometimes, so I think that's where I get the idea from.

Update! yay!

For this class, I started making an animatic for the final film. I'm not finished, so I plan to work on that today. I'm a little confused on what kind of music I'm going to use for my film...it's hard to find exactly what you want especially when you didn't plan a story around a song you already had. I was thinking of some happy, upbeat, instrumental music- like a clarinet, trumpet or piano playing some tune. I looked for some over the weekend, and I couldn't really find what I was looking for. Oh well- I'll find something, I hope!

Storyboards

character sizes

final script

Setting: A light yellow room filled with paint cans, easels, and empty canvases
Sound Effect: Music play throughout film
Action:

Scene 1.1- Blank white background. Camera pans up while big, colorful drops of paint splatters on the white. L/S of Sophie in the room. Purple paint drips from her finger onto white piece of paper. M/S of Sophie as she looks down smiling. Sohpie leans in to paint.

Scene 1.2- C/U pf Sophie's finger painting down the piece of paper. Camera follows the paint. Down shot of Sophie leaning over paper. Sophie leans up and reveals a purple rabbit on the paper. M/S of Sophie. She has a big smile on her face.

Scene 1.3- Shot of paper with the purple rabbit. A pause, then the rabbit’s ear waves at her. Sophie blinks and tilts her head.

Scene 1.4- M/S. The rabbit jumps off the paper and Sophie catches him. The rabbit kisses her and jumps off her arms. Sophie stands perplexed.

Scene 1.5- The rabbit hops toward the camera, splattering paint everywhere. Sophie snaps out her astonishment and chases after him.

Scene 1.6- Shot of rabbit running down the room. Then shot of Sophie running after him.

Scene 1.7- The rabbit jumps by an open orange paint can. The rabbit leaves the shot. The rabbit pops his head back into the frame looking at the paint can. He is curious and dips his ear into the paint. He paints a picture of a smiley face on the wall. He mimics the smile he drew. He sees Sophie coming and jumps away. Sophie chases after him.

Scene 1.8- L/S. They run down the room and the rabbit jumps on a canvas leaning against the wall. When Sophie reaches him, he jumps and lands on his feet behind her. The canvas falls on Sophie.

Scene 1.9- M/S. Seeing what happened, the rabbit starts laughing at Sophie. Sophie looks down. A blank piece of paper, orange, and green paint are next to her.

Scene 2.1- Shot of the rabbit painting pictures on the wall with his ears. He turns his head when Sophie whistles at him. Sophie holds up a carrot she just finger painted. The rabbit runs towards it.

Scene 2.2- Sophie throws the carrot into a blank canvas. The rabbit jumps after it. The rabbit is stuck motionless inside the painting, a look of happiness with his carrot.

Scene 2.3- Sophie sighs with relief and walks off screen.

Model sheets

Here are my two characters, Sophie and Rabbit!

5th tutorial: Lip Sync

Here's my lip sync! This was pretty fun to do.

4th tutorial: walk cycle

Here's my walk cycle. More like a running cycle, but whatevs.

2nd character jump

I re-worked the second jump assignment with the rabbit.




So now I think I may understand the concept of switching symbols in an animation. Yay for learning!

3rd tutorial: rotoscope

pink flowers and all. I'm such a girl.

2nd tutorial: clown jump and puppet jump

The clown/puppet jumping tutorial we had to do. At first I thought it was going to be difficult, but it was really fun.

Illustrarions

Gerald Scarfe

Drew Struzan.
He's done practically every famous movie poster. Over 150, or some insane amount like that.

Maya Kurasawa



I found this piece but unfortunately I don't know the artist.

Just keep swimming...

Wow. I have to answer the question of what is my favorite animated movie. This is rather complicated. like the most of us, I was brought up on animated movies. Couldn't get enough of them. I think it drove my parents nuts.

Of course, Disney was right there from the start. Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin... but I used to have this habit growing up where I would watch one movie constantly everyday for weeks, then switch to another movie. Some of these movies included The Wizard of Oz, A league of their Own, A Major League (I guess I really liked baseball movies), and then the two I would watch until the VHS tape got all tangled up- All Dogs Go to Heaven and A Land Before Time.

I love these movies because they were what I grew up on. And they were dark. Most Don Bluth stuff is dark, but it didn't condescend to kids. it didn't treat us like little idiots or dim down the intensity of the films to make it more "little kid" appropriate, like most movies do these days. No, these movies treated us with respect and gave us good characters and great storylines. My ultimate favorite Don Bluth movie would be The Secret of NIMH. That to me is a classic, and I know many people feel the same way. It had everything- it was funny, it was terrifying, it was sad, and it was smart.



I bought the DVD last year and it made me a little upset because the front cover on the box was this ugly drawing with bright happy colors that made it seem like such an innocent sing-song kiddie movie that you wouldn't take seriously which is not what the movie is like at all. What was wrong with using the original movie poster for the box cover? Seriously.

The Lion King is high up on my favorite list. It's the first movie I remember covering my eyes in the theater because I got scared during one part. You know a movie is good when it makes you react emotionally. That means it sucked you in, it got you interested and it got you hooked. I love everything about this movie. The animation, the backgrounds, the characters...beautiful. Plus it's got one of the coolest Disney Villans ever, at least that's my opinion. Yeah, definitely The Lion King.

Most recent animated movie that I top on my list is Finding Nemo, and I think a lot of that has to do with the way other people reacted to it. Everyone loved this movie and it made me realize that people of all ages, adults to little kids, can love animation and be moved by the story and characters. It's the movie that made me really want to become an animator. I love watching the extras on the DVD because Pixar does a good job showing people what it's like to make these brilliant movies. Plus they got to go snorkeling in the Caribbean somewhere to study the marine life which made me say, "Now, I want to do that for a living."





Oh, and these are not movies, but they're parodies of movies...with cute bunnies! I love these little flash cartoons from Jennifer Shiman. They're called The 30 Second Bunny Movie Theater and they are hilarious. Check out the website at angryalien.com... they will make you laugh.




I know there are many more movies that I'm neglecting. But I think I gave a few good examples of what I believe to be some of the best animated movies. Maybe most of these movies are based on nostaglia, but oh well. I still love 'em! This is uber long, and I'm sorry for that. I don't even talk this much.