#08 - Environment settings

Douglas did some surfing on the net to have a look at the precedents which he thought we could develop our background from, and these were the designs which he did.

The jungle scene would be something like this one.

And this would be where the main character runs off to. (where the penguin guru lives.)

The grass in the scenes would be animated like the tutorial which we had on the fire. But we need to develop this scene a bit more because at the moment Michael and I think its a little bit weird.

#07 - The development of characters

During the mid-semester break. we focused on the assignment 3, which was the development of the characters and also creating an animatic to see how the timing of the story would fit.

Michael started with off the character sketches, so we can use them to base our flash drawings on.


After importing it into flash and locking it as a background I proceded to using the brush tool to draw it out and the results were:

However the thing about drawing the characters with a brush tool, was that it the character would have to be drawn for each scene. And so I started using the pen tool to create a character which resulted:

And then after talking with michael about the shadowing and colours, we came up with this:

#06 - birth of 2mrd.inc

Weeks 3&4 were mainly getting into the winning concept pitches selected by Josh and the other judges. Out of the all the concepts I decided to join Marc's pitch, it was about a monkey learning some dance moves. I guess the main thing that attracted me to this concept pitch was the amount of rendering skills put to the characters. (however, later on we found out that they were Referenced pictures..LOL. plan fail.)

Anyways, we got together came in on the weekends and did our Project plan. We were to each bring some ideas for the company name, so when we got there would could just select one out of the list. Douglas came with "2mrd", "mmrd" and a few others. I thought that "monkey studios" might've been okays, but we all decided that "2mrd" sounded the best. Douglas and I finished off the timeline.

During one of Sustainable Communities lectures, I saw Michael do some brainstorming on what the logo could look like. So I did some sketches and came up with 2 main ones, through some development. After showing the group at the dmiii tutorial after the lecture, they all agreed on of the designs and michael set of to play around with photoshop and did some nice effects and improved on my sketches.

#05 - CATCH~! Its my Concept.^^

During the development of this assignment, it got me to start drawing using adobe flash. This was initial fairly annoying, not know the shortcuts for each tool like I do in the other programs. However this gradually faded away as I spent more and more time playing around with it.
One thing I developed when using flash was how to use the weight of the brush tool (shortcut = b), the thinner the lines the more crisp and clean the drawings would look, I discovered that a bit later on in the drawing.. after I have done all of my story board and started onto my characters.

I started this assignment off with drawing the set, the environment of the animation. Then moving onto each scene, choosing the camera angles.

#04 - Kazier

This tutorial taught us another way of animating a walk cycle and movements of people. Unlike the previous animation way which was just drawing each frame by frame, this way of animating each limb is a symbol itself, and then all that is done is each limb is moved a certain angle of direction over a certain amount of frames and then tween between the keyframes so that it makes a movement.

We had an check up on our idea for the concept pitch. At the start I was thinking bout doing an animation which included the following picture, however I couldn't think up of a storyline to go with it. During a 2 hour lecture I saw an itouch application game, called Mr. space, its a pretty fun intense game (character moves left and right, and you have to run to certain spots that has gaps in the ceiling when the ceiling come crushing down. Also the interval between each escape gets shorter and shorts so it tests your reaction time). It then hit me that I could use this as a concept pitch for my animation, and editing the game a bit to create a funny storyline.

#03 - Walk cycle

#02 - Function keys

NOTE TO SELF:

F5 - insert blank frame (keeps the object to that frame with no animation)
F6 - insert key frame (animations the object to that location)
F7 - insert blank
F8 - create symbol, graphic, movie clip
F9 - actionscript