Virgin Ident complete! YES!

I am very pleased that - after a long night - I have now completed the Ident project. It was fun to deepen my knowledge of Flash and incorporate a lot of hand drawn Artwork to carry out my idea of bringing snooker balls to life..




There was a moment of crisis last night - the flash file kept crashing. With the help of some determination and several cups of tea I solved it. The problem was I was trying to animate massive 'png' pool balls. By converting them to jpegs it allowed my computer to cope with what I was trying to get it to do.

I have learned from this last term to adopt a new technique to time managing projects. Pretend that the deadline is 48 hours before the actual deadline. This way I may be able to add all the finishing touches that I desire instead of handing in something that I still feel could be improved.

Anyways I fully enjoyed watching everyones ident.. its amazing to see the wide range of stuff that people produced.

I am now going to fully enjoy some sleep!

Knight Rider storyboard

I like that storyboarding is an interdisciplinary skill and can be used for Live Action as well as Animation. Its an area I am definitely interested in as It seems to offer a fair bit of creative license.

Jane - The talking empty jar...

So heres my final Flash project movie..



I found myself laughing out loud whilst working on this, it was fun to
give an inanimate object such character. I think I may have been subliminally influenced by Family Guy in terms of facial animation.. I found it helped to work on the realism of the setting to increase the impact of Jane the Jar and give her a sense of place. All in all I found it to be an enjoyable project..

The Life Aquatic - Animated sea creatures..

Love these sea creatures that were thought up by Wes Anderson and animated in stop motion by Henry Selick. They are the sort of aquatic fish that dreams are made of.. I thought they were done in CG but was surprised to find out that they are stop motion.

"For creature design in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, director Wes Anderson had the interesting idea of taking something you know, then adding one strong new element to it: golden barracuda; sugar crabs; jaguar shark. He believed the resulting creature would be something the audience would want to believe existed (I know I wish they existed). In the case of the Crayon Pony fish, I went for a slight variation from reality in anatomical design, but–as you see in my sketch–used actual crayon colors that Wes picked for the body. In bringing the creature to life, we gave it a carefully and beautifully animated horse-like mane with some equine head motions while having it look like it was floating in water."

Henry Selick, Director of Animation

Sources :
http://www.landmarktheatres.com/mn/lifeaquatic.html
http://www.awn.com/articles/reviews/hydronicus-inverticus-interview-henry-selick

Virgin Animatic

Heres my animatic... it seems essential to do this to see how the timing works and how the whole thing looks as a whole. I'm happy with the music as well (borrowed from my mate Nathan - hopefully thats cool but better check with him soon..!)



Now all that remains is the final version......