Week 7: Outside of Class - Finished animation

https://youtu.be/XNO3LqHzf84

This is my final logo animation. I didn't actually change much from the 75% done one, however I did play around with some sound effects. None of them really seemed to help or add to what I was doing. It was especially difficult since my animation could only be 5 seconds long. I think that this solution is the best one.

Week 7a

Today in class we had a mini-critique for our 50% done animations. I got some feedback, but nobody really told me anything major that needed to change. I asked a few people what they thought about the white background, and they said it didn't really bother them that much. However, they said if I wanted to push my animation, I could include some things that bring the character to life. One of their ideas was to have it blinking, or to have the whiskers/nose twitch. In class, I tried out the puppet tool, which one of my classmates taught me how to use. However, I don't think it will work for what I want to do. One of my ideas is to hand animate the eye and put it into a gif that will only play once. I will have to see how this goes. Originally I was just going to turn my project in on Wednesday, but I think I will wait until after break. Hopefully I can make the changes necessary to really bring this project together.

After attempting to do the eye blink with a gif, it appears that I wont be able to. This is because the gif keeps corrupting when the composition is rendered. So, for now I have just made it so the background color and colors of the words/figure change to blue/white.

For next class we have to have our animations at 75% done, so here is mine:

https://youtu.be/Df2lqeP5g_0

Week 6: Outside of Class - Animation 50% done

Today for class we had to have our animations 50% done. Here is mine:

So far, I am happy with it. I think I may add the character winking or twitching his whiskers to really solidify this idea of animation. My logo is essentially telling the story of animation, so having that final touch might help.

I wanted to have the background be a color, but I ran into an issue with that. If I change the color of the background, you can see the path of the illustration's reveal. I am not sure there is a way to change this, and I also don't know another way to do the drawing-in effect. I will have to see what people say in class on Monday.

Week 6b

Today in class we got the go-ahead on animating. Since I wasn't really sure how to do the drawing effect I wanted in Adobe After Effects, I looked up a tutorial. This tutorial taught me how to do exactly what I wanted using the brush tool. Basically all I had to do was take the brush and draw in 1 stroke how I wanted it to animate. The effect looks convincing and was much easier than I expected to do. Since I used this method, I am also able to easily change the color of the lines in my original image. So, I just added in keyframes to have the color fade from gray to black. Professor Pannafino taught me how to use a mask to have my words fade in. I am essentially over halfway done at this point, so from here it will just be adding finishing touches.

Week 6a

Today in class we had our storyboards looked over and critiqued by other students. My fellow classmates didn't really have anything in particular that I should change. They said they liked the idea and thought it would be effective given that the company I am doing a logo for is an animation company. Basically my goal is to sort of tell the story of 2d animation through my logo animation. Professor Pannafino said that I needed to fix my marks, and that my idea may be difficult. However, I feel determined to do it anyway since I love the films this company has made.

Here is my fixed storyboard:

I basically just cleaned up my marks and made them more uniform. This seems to be a bit clearer now, at least aesthetically.

Week 5: Outside of Class - Vector Storyboard

This is my first vector storyboard that we had to have done for Monday. Basically my idea is that the character would be drawn in starting in a light grey,  pencil color. Once it was fully drawn in, it would then transition into black and company's name would fade in from the same direction that the illustration was drawn in.  I will probably also have some color in the background or maybe animate the character a little. We will see how it goes when I finally do animate it.

Week 5b

Today in class, we chose our logos to animate. I decided to do the Studio Ghibli logo, which as a reminder looks like this:

We had to create 2 different storyboards for how we wanted to animate the logo. For the first one, I decided to do a drawing animation to represent the fact this is an animation company,which is known for their 2d films, many of them being traditionally done. Here is my first one:

For the second one, I had some trouble thinking what I wanted to do. I am not sure how possible this would be, but I thought I would have the characters blink and then have the text appear, since, once again, this is an animation studio. So, here is that storyboard:

I think I will go with the first one. It seems to make more sense and ultimately I think it will be more effective.