Animated Interstitial

This is my piece for assessment one. I wanted to stick with the same style throughout the entire animation because I thought that it would look somewhat tacky if there was a combination between drawn images and still photographs. I decided to use a cartoonistic/ pop art style. I liked the idea of having bold coloures outlined in black. It was also easy to draw in Photoshop. Each image is hand drawn using the mouse and saved as a PNG file. The short animation denotes my love for nature. The sea, mountains, trees and plants, and my favourite, waterfalls.

I didn't use any effects. All that was used was the positioning, scaling and opacity tool. On the sand layers I created masks so that the trees and plants could come out from underneath it.

At first I was a bit reluctant to show others, but when they said it was good it changed my mind.....slowly. Because this was the first time of doing something like this I didn't want to try anything too hard and then have to change the entire plan if it didn't work out.

I think the fews things that I should have worked on a bit more was to have more time left at the end for the waterfall to play. But I didn't want to go all the way through the whole thing and reposition all the images again, it took me a long time. Also, the transition between the cave and the waterfall could have been a bit better but I was running out of time. All in all I was very pleased with my first official short animation piece :)

Week 7 - 3-D Composition

We didn;t actually do the exercise for this week. We just worked on our assignments. I was quite happy with mine as I started it over the weekend and had about 4 seconds left to animate. I mostly just played around with opacity and positioning. I hand drew all my images in Photoshop. My awesome coconut tree :D

Week 6 - Physical Graffiti pt. 2

Ok, I went and did the graffiti thing like it said. I honestly had no idea what exactly I was doing. More of just chucking a few images together and making them movereally. I played around with the curves effect like it said in the PDF and did manage to get some cool effects. My favourite would have to be the magician guy at the end. I used masks and weirdly made the graffiti come out from behind them. Slightly dodgy but ok. I also put some sort of 3-D effect on the second image as it moves around the screen. Im still getting use to using After Effects, especially with the effects tab. This was the first time I'd ever used it. It doesn't look too bad. It could have been slightly better, but its just experimental work. Its allowed to be dodgy :)
I've actually figured out how to keep the best quality for my videos and make them smaller in size. I just export them as best quality quicktime movies and then convert them to MPEG. Unfortunately for this one I lost the original After Effects file and so I had to convert the lower quality one instead.

Week 6 - Physical Graffiti

I was actually away for this week so obviousely I didn't do the exercise. I decided to do them at home, and so I did the first part of the exercise - creating a 'Sin City' look. I've done two. It took me a while to actually figure out how to do the rain properly, even with the tutorial. I used the same image for the first one because the other image didn't seem to be working. Although, it worked the second time round. In the second image, I used the small dialogue piece between Gail and Dwight when she puts her gun to his face. I think these turned out quite well. The only thing was I forgot to pull the gun down a bit lower because you can see that the trigger has no finger on it..............unless its a magic gun thats works all by itself :P