DV2900 Talking points - Critical review

Today I screened my animation to my class and gained feedback, to improve it. I personally thought that the screening went really well, The animation itself was complete as mention before, with subtitles. My peers were able to give me some good feedback to help me improve the animation and for when i animate in the future.

Overall everyone liked the animation, complimenting the humour, Lip syncing and animation in general, but with good points there are always bad points, but these are there for me to improve. I was told to add more movement in to one of the scenes with the character rocking back and forth; I made sure that the character was moving, but to make sure that it isn't to sharp I applied some ease of the graphic to make it more realistic.

Most of my feedback was to improve my subtitles, for people that have hearing disabilities. I have a person who has a hearing disability in my class and he himself gave me many different things to change to help him understand whats happening. The font was a main part that he wanted me to change; he told me to make it a san serif font, this is a really easy fix and it did make the subtitles look more a appealing. With the subtitles I added the sound effects as well, an example when the door opens and close, that helped him a lot but there was one scene that goes on for a while and he said to add the word 'repeat' to the subtitles to show that he is saying the same thing over and over. An important part of my improvements was to change the colour of everyone thats speaking because if they all talk at once then he would get confused which is understandable, so I gave everyone there own colour for him to know when each person is speaking, but I kept the sound effects white.

All this improvements made my animation better and I'm thankfully for the feedback. I personally thought that it would be better if I had more time and as I have mention previously that all the planning needed to be done early. In the future I want to do the research and planning done in the first few weeks, and to start animation early because I can make it more detailed and I can find new ways of doing new things. Overall the project has been very enlightening, I have learnt a lot of new things, I have really enjoyed learning how to lip sync and I think that I picked it up really well and I personally found it very easy.

DV2900 Talking points - Animating

Today I started to create the animation but it became really problematic.

As you can see from the images above I came into a problem early on while using the 3D tool to create this effect. I used this tutorial for help (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3yrbcxHaKo). To get this door opening I put the center of the rotation at the point of where the hinges would be in a real door. I then rotated it. The symbols and mechanics are not very different from 3D software, but as you can see this isn't working too well doesn't look right and the reason being is that the door isn't long enough, it needs to be as long as a real door because the bottom of it will be in scene.

There should look better

As you can see I adjusted it and now it looks a lot better more like a real door. As you can see in the animatic I will be having a the camera zoom into the room, and I have decided that I am going to do this using a vcam ( Virtual camera ), using this I can create a manner of different types of camera angles and shots throughout that animation itself. I got the vcam from a Youtube artist called Jazza (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhGxKMFOJ84), this tutorial taught a bit more about the vcam, so I can utilize it for my own work. 

As I started using the vcam I came into another problem, the vcam wouldn't show the right parts as you can see in the images above. I nearly gave up with using the vcam because I didn't know how to fix it but my peer helped me to fix the problem by going into the symbol and making sure its the right aspect ratio and that the vcam is centered with the little dot in the center as well as the vcam itself. (see image below)

Once that was sorted and the vcam worked, I then had to put the characters in the room itself, all I did was draw them on top of the background layer.

The characters were just drawn with the brush tool in Flash I didn't have much planning for the these characters in this scene and this did make it problematic because it took long than expected. Once the characters were in place, I decided to add a fade out to and a better transition. I had to create the first keyframe, then make it a motion tween, than I selected where it would be faded out completely and changed the alpha down to 0 and it automatically created the frame and the fading out using the motion tween.

This was the scene right after with having the main character to sit down, but I didn't have much planning for it, so as you can see with the images below I created a wireframe skeleton of the character and for each key frame. 

After creating these and the in between frames I had to flesh it out and give him colour and clothing. The legs of the character in this scene was all created frame by frame. This was the only way I could think of doing it and to be honest I enjoyed it the only problem I may have with it is that its square but that is only a little problem.

After creating the legs I then needed to create the torso for the when the character sits down, this was easily created but just making the arms and tweening them down, as seen in the image below.

To create the other characters in the next scenes I decided to draw over my storyboard / animatic, for a few reasons, one the positions and camera shot will the follow the story board but the main reason is to keep the proportion of the character correct and the to try and make it look as sharp as I want it. 

After this scene there isn't much animation, there are a few frame by frame animation sequence but I had no problems with that. The main section I needed to work out was the lip syncing. 

I created a test of the lip syncing a while back and it don't find it hard at all. When I finished creating each character in each scene I then create all the mouth movements and loaded them into keyframe caddy, all that was next was aligning them with the audio. I didn't really find it that hard at all sometimes it felt weird because the character was in a three quarter position, but after a few tweaks It looked fine.

I didn't just move the mouths I made all the characters blink too, making them blink was hard at all. When I decided to do this I thought that it isn't to different to doing the lip syncing process, so I create the blink frame by frame and then used keyframe caddy to embed it into the animation, to make it look more realistic. 

One of the most important parts was for me to create subtitles for our deaf student, it wasn't just for him it was for all audiences I personally wanted to do it and hopefully it will be fine for screening and he will be able to understand whats happening.