#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

#01 – Initiating flash with balls

Dear bloggers,

After week 1 of the Digital Media III, Narratives in Animation, it has made me realise the wide range of possibilities that the program can create and do. Ranging from life like characters, to simple cut out characters like South Park. During our first studio session, we learnt the basic design settings when using flash, which buttons did what and how to set the screen layout to a certain consistent size.

The balls initiation was an interesting one, how to make the balls projectile motion become more life like, become more real. Lots of techniques were used to help achieve this motion, first starting off making parabola shapes for the path of motion for the ball, then followed on to duplicating this parabola to make the ball bounce multiple times. Setting these parabola shapes to form a guide for the ball, and making a classic tween between each frame to blend the motion.

---*my flash file stuffed up at this point so had to re-do my ball file*---

Then moving each key frame around to make the bounce time suit the projectile path, and then lastly easing the balls movement into the motion and then out of the motion, since the acceleration speed of the ball varies differently at each point of the path.

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Ps: Graphic Tablet is awesome.

("Ball" word count for the post = 9)