Doom Clouds

Color

noreply@blogger.com (Mina) — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 02:26:00 +0000

That thing I did

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 03:06:00 +0000

Reference for that shot I did earlier. I see how I need to adjust the matte painting based upon where Ayu is supposed to be standing (the transparent plank) and the bus stop post. The nice thing about this is that it actually makes my work easier in a way.

01-04ii Ready for color

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:35:00 +0000

After those previous shots this one went by like a breeze. I should animate only wide shots from now on.

01-04ii Inbetweening Progress

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 01:41:00 +0000

Nothing to say today. I'm stopping to eat a late dinner before work tomorrow. I'll leave this here too, since it's what I was listening to when I stopped:
http://youtu.be/ALfjaHF2jYY

Shot 01-04iii Ext. Frames

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 03:32:00 +0000

Very little has changed in this shot so far. I've only tweaked existing frames. I did was raise the hemline and shorten the jacket by a couple inches to match the rest of the film, and gave the skirt a little more of a bell shape, as well as a few fold lines. I also made Ayu's head slightly bigger to make sure she's 6 heads tall. Generally I hope more shots are sorta like this, because I'd like to preserve (in this case) as much of Tori's original coloring work as possible. Of course I'm probably going to have to color this times 3 more frames since I'm about to inbetween this shot to bring it up from 3s (8 frames per second in the film) to 1s or my typical variable timing method (I think I had a professor say it's the "European timing system"? Either way, typically most American animators prefer to hold a single frame rate per shot, but as I've seen in both Japanese and European Animation, sometimes this seems a little unnecessary. It honestly depends on the speed of the motions in the shot or what's needed to make sure all the subtle nuances you want to animate get across. I'd love to always animate on 3s (1/3rd the work of animating on 1s), but for the most part it tends to be too choppy for the kind of slow, subtle movements of these characters- at least that's how I felt in the original version of this film.

One thing to note on this shot is that this was one of the first in the film that used the Hanna-Barbera technique for limited animation. While other shots may have had still parts of the character, they were either redrawn or copy pasted and then drawn upon (paint animation technique). This one, literally has a layer (equivilant of cel) that stays on for the parts of Ayu that hold still. From this point on I continued to use this method since it's easier to maintain if you want to make adjustments and has no real drawbacks.

I just noticed I forgot to tag this shot in Photoshop. I'll have that in the next update.

Truly Finished Animation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 02:16:00 +0000

So like I said before, I felt that perhaps more drawings needed to be added to the animation of Ayu...so I did just that- and the result are smoother ease-ins and better timing all around that I feel takes the animation from just being animated to feeling more like a living picture.

BEHOLD.

Now I just need to After Effects the two together and sync up the audio.

Shot 01-04

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 03:38:00 +0000

So I've gotten around to finishing up these two bits of animation. Ayumi's head took an incredible amount of labor for the amount of animation that came out of it. Ezri's bit of animation was a lot of fun though. As usual the next step in these is to color and shade the frames. I do have some background work to tweak for this shot too. Despite the lack of broad movement, this was actually one of my most challenging bits of drafting/animation so far. There are approximately 50 drawings for Ezri and 30 some for Ayumi (and looking at this I may have to go back and add more). Hopefully I can be more efficient in the future.

01-02i Progression, more personality

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 05:39:00 +0000

After running a check against the editing stage, the following was done- Variable framerate, some animation on 1's and some on 2's. Additional secondary motion added at the end. Additional head tilt may be added to the beginning before coloring stage. Enough has been redrawn at this point that this shot no longer contains any of the original drawings of version 1.

deviantArt deviation

01-02i Progression

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 02:12:00 +0000

01-02i Progression - Animation now on 2s, all frames redrawn. Additional frames may be added. Coloring stage is next.

In the meantime enjoy some other random art on my deviantArt profile

01-02i, "I think it'll be fun"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 23:48:00 +0000

So the first time I animated sync dialogue for a film I said, "I am so going to do full animation because no one expects an anime influenced style to do lipsync." And so I did, and it kind of sucked because I drew lip shapes for every single vowel. Then in a 3D Animation class, my professor, Mark Reisch explained to us how people are actually very lazy about moving their mouths. At this moment I actually forget the more scientific breakdown of how mouths move based on shapes. But I remember that one good way to tell is to say the dialogue yourself and actually listen to the sound and write it out, for example, "I think it'll be fun" as, "Ayee-tink-ittle-beeh-fahn" Another good idea of course, that goes for all forms of animation is to actually record yourself doing the action and use it as a reference (much like references for still art). It's actually a very good way to work. It's quite common for animators to at least act out what they're animating at some point during a shot even if they don't record it, just paying attention to how your body/face feels while doing it. I recall another professor, Johnny Robinson, saying that it's not uncommon to see animators skipping around the studio like little girls- Although that could just be a very nice excuse....

Anyway this shot, I kind of cheated on, like I will be for a lot of shots because it was already done....just not as well as I wanted. So what you're seeing here was 90% drawn in 2010, but I've been trying to fudge around little tweaks to make each individual drawing more solid so that when i convert this to an animation on 2s it'll be amazing. This shot will probably take a lot longer than 01-01iii and I already know it has less screen time LOL.

01-01iii Pre-Final

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:21:00 +0000

All Ready for After Effects

http://xenoandroid.deviantart.com/gallery/30613549#/d4b4plq

This was actually done last night but couldn't be posted due to an Internet outage. So actually it's also already composited too but it hasn't been QC'd in the editing timeline. So that will arrive later, if I even bother to post the final version.

Here's a production still of the shot in the final form-

http://xenoandroid.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d4bqzo4

01-01iii Colored

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 03:38:00 +0000

Colored by my friend! Apparently it was relaxing - http://ceruleanwing.deviantart.com/

http://xenoandroid.deviantart.com/art/01-01iii-260560286

Annnd Done (with animation)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:49:00 +0000

Now all that's left is a million other things, many of which aren't as fun...

More progress-ism

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 03:13:00 +0000

Partially tweened. All I have to do is finish drawing all the unfinished frames...and still need to add that blink beforehand. This is Turning her head away is Ayu's response to Ezri saying "hi there". I think it's great, that's how I like to respond to friendly people. I'm particularly proud of the non-twinned pigtail secondary motion.

A larger version of this can be found here (this link will always show the most recent progress)- http://xenoandroid.deviantart.com/art/01-01iii-Pencil-Test-260560286

Look at that lens flare action

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 02:16:00 +0000

Finished revamping this shot...

Now working on this completely new shot...

It's on loop, but it's a simple head turn, right now it's 6 frames mostly on 4's, to be inbetweened to 2's or 1's. Ayu turns her face on Ezri, because she's annoyed. I kind of want to write more about the project and my life as an artist since the last post but I'm actually incredibly tired- so I won't this time. Instead, here is a link to an image with some commentary on this production- http://xenoandroid.deviantart.com/#/d4ayqel

Enjoy the secondary motion, I know I do.

「DREAM BUBBLE」1.1

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 May 2011 02:21:00 +0000

Exactly one year after the initial screening of The first animation of Dream Bubble, I decided that because I haven't felt willing to release the film in it's current form on the wild, that I should go back and make it into something I'm satisfied with. Despite the praise it got and those that were impressed, I find that if that a personal work does not satisfy me, both the client and the producer, why should I settle for it? So I place here the first two screen shots from Dream Bubble 1.1 or it's real title,
「DREAM BUBBLE : One Summer Morning」.

The two shots previewed here have also been completely reanimated as well, and are now on 2's (For those who don't know what that means, just think 2D Feature/Disney animation) and the 'acting' has been improved. The sound track is also now in actual 5.1 surround sound and the entire film in it's current cut runs 7 minutes with several additional scenes. Due to the kind of production values I'm aiming for and my paying work, I don't expect this film to be (re)done until 2012. Unless a large wad of money falls from the sky and I can pay people to work on it.

On a side note I've discovered that magpierss works badly with unicode, so my site is now using something else to display the blog on the homepage.

So I haven't posted anything on...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 14:49:00 +0000

...this thing in a long time. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother putting a blog/news thing in place every time I design a new website. Maybe it's because it's just so 'normal' to have one that I'd rather get it out of the way in the early design stage rather than having to shove it in later on.

I have however posted some new artwork to the gallery...like two or three weeks ago, which I still haven't posted on dA. I have a bad/good? habit of not posting most of I make. I find it important that when I post something I feel completely proud of the work and for that to be the case it has to be finished, better than anything else I've done, and something of meaning. If I feel the work is somehow incomplete or needs to be reworked, few people will ever see it. Add that to the fact that I have so many other things that I need to do or want to do, and client work that I can't really show yet, it may appear that I've totally stopped doing art. Another thing is that if the work is someone else's idea of amazing but not my idea of amazing, it will also find itself in the vault. I am aware that can become a problem when it comes to selling one's self to clients/employers, as many times client types want to see variation and range so they can get a better idea of what they want from you and be a little more assured that you can produce what they want.

So for that I plan to once again recut my demo reels, especially the generalist reel which I may rename to 'montage reel'. In the new reel I'll be sure to include some things that show a bit of this.

A Pink Site

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:58:00 +0000

All of the tweaks to make the site look the same across all major browsers has been done.

In case you're wondering why the site is so pink. It's pink because I know you're going to wonder why it's pink. I wanted a brighter site than I used to have but I didn't want it to burn the eyes.

Blue is an overused color on websites, very cold and corporately [madeupword]. Apparently it means you're serious but I think it means you're boring. Green is a good 'natural' neutral as far as psychological connection but that's not what I'm going for, I like the warmth of orange but orange (and yellow) are almost too hot. It's like staring into the sun if it's bright. What I ended up choosing was warm and loaded with a more emotional and less sterile feeling. Unfortunately it can also be taken other ways, but my nature to challenge the boundaries or guidelines society gives us only encouraged the decision. So there you go, a pink site.

Now I feel like my demo reels need adjustments though. Going to see if I can cut them a bit better.

Site is Now Live

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:20:00 +0000

Site is now live to work out any kinks that may be more difficult to find in the testing environment.

It doesn't look like it, but it's been a long grinding process to get it to this point. A lot of the time was spent on the Javascript stuff. Figuring out the most efficient layout for various pages was also sometimes a challenge.

In the end I like this site a lot better than my older one and based on my previous experiences, the site will get tweaks to be better looking and have more content from here on out. There are a few things I don't quite like about the color scheme, and a few things that I know don't look right across all browsers, the site is completely functional now.

My favorite feature is the in-line demo reel viewer that replaces the slideshow and doesn't waste CPU cycles in the background. The slideshow code is completely unloaded to reduce overhead on the visitor/client's computer. So people using Flash on mac won't get completely screwed over.

I'm also experimenting with encrypted email and phone number text. The end user shouldn't notice a difference if they have Javascript enabled, but basically the text should not be readable by most bots. In the event your client doesn't support Javascript for some reason, there is still the contact form. I also plan on doubling up on the encrypted email with an image of my business card in the future.

Anyway, the site is located over at- http://www.xenouniverse.com/ hosted by 000WebHost at the moment. For a completely free webhost they've been really good. In the future I may try their pay services if I decide I need them. My site is no longer located on the RIT, College of Imaging Arts server. Any visitors attempting to go there will simply be forwarded, until they take down my account anyway.

Web Development

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:04:00 +0000

All of the hard stuff for the website is pretty much done. All I have left to do is to update my primary animation reel and post it here and link it there. This time I'm quite pleased with how the site is turning out. The code is 100x cleaner than the last site and the structure is more manageable. I've also tied my gallery into the home page slideshow for dynamic updates. And started using ajax/jquery for a few things to make it more user friendly. Since I'm also using google voice, I've added the widget to the site on top of my listed phone number. My email address and phone number are on the site for the first time via javascript encryption to deter bots and spammers.

The new site is still unavailable as it's currently hosted on a testing machine, but hopefully I'll have the working thing filled out and working on a public host before the end of the month.

Yet Another Blargh

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:59:00 +0000

So it's been many years since I seriously used a publicly hosted blogging service and the first time I've used one in a more professional(?) attempt.

I'm currently in the process of redesigning my website from the ground up. I've decided that instead of hosting one on my own site, I would instead use a service like this and put an RSS feed on the site for layout integration. This has a couple advantages. One is that I'll never have to worry about server migration of Movable Type or Wordpress scripts in fact, I don't have to worry about managing my own service. The second is that a blog on a public service is more publicly visible, even if just a little, and I certainly want to share with more of an audience. You're more likely to have a random person come across your posts and make friends as I learned many years ago.

I'm still finalizing my decision on what service to use. But publishing a post and seeing how it works is part of the process.