Sena's First Year Blog

1MDX Animation student

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Another exercise on my brother’s tablet! Drawing on the screen is so fun :)

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A little walk cycle I did on my brother’s tablet, took three hours. Couldn’t save it in high quality for some reason, will try to color it if I manage to do that.

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REFLECTION - ONE MINUTE FILM

I’m happy that I can say this project was the most productive I’ve ever been for myself. This isn’t to say the work I’ve done was a huge amount and quality. But compared to, well, myself; this is a huge step towards improvement.

Altough this isn’t to say it is all smooth sailing. From the very beginning to the end (which is not now, I’m not finished yet), there has been struggle after struggle, mistake after mistake. Some of which were inevitable, I’m still learning so I would say it is natural to not know how things work right away. But many of my mistakes were because of me and my unnecessary ovethinking. If I had not wasted my time doing very useless re-do animatics and voice-overs, maybe I would’ve had a finished film for the hand in today. The main reason for this process-block is, I think, because I wasn’t completely happy with my concept. Or rather, how I was telling the story, which is already hard to tell because it’s not a single day of memory or moment, it’s more of a re-imagining my childhood imagination. Still, lesson number one, don’t think too much about your negatives. Or you’ll do nothing but sit down and do no work for weeks.

Lesson number two, perhaps the most important one, plan everything. Which I could for some parts, and really couldn’t on others. The whole process was really messy and was mostly improvised as I was going. And it is kind of working, but probably because this is a one minute long animation with a personal, customasible story. I really need to work on my planning and time-management .

But in the end, I’m really happy with my animation so far. Yes it still has so much work to do, but I’m really excited to finish it and see everything come together. And I’m really glad this has been fun rather than agonizing, I feel like this won’t be the case in much bigger projects. I’m trying to cherish it.

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Compiled scenes for the one minute film. I have about 30 seconds of animation, there is still much more to do, but I hope what I have so far will be enough to give an idea of the final product.

It’s completely my fault that I don’t have a finished video. I made things much harder and complicated for myself. The character animation takes longer than it should because I feel like there should always be a movement. But I think it will look cooler this way in the end, I just have to keep it up and hopefully finish it fully before June. With character animations, all the backgorunds, special effects and editing done; I hope to have a short film that I can say I worked hard on.

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Creature animations for the one min film. I was planning to make them cut-out stopmotion, but I really don’t have much time to figure that process out. Besides, I think these look fine for now. Maybe later on I’ll replace them with cut-out.

I like the nudibranch, it was hard to animate with the skirt thingy and the antennas, but I think it looks allright

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These gifs are from the session were we tried to make a little animation combining 2 min poses. I usually don't like doing life drawings digitally, but this was honestly very fun to do.

Speaking of, I've lost so many digital drawings this semester (most of them personal) and it really is sad. I hope the work I've put so far is enough.

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Life Drawings Part 4 - These are my latest life drawings. I don't think I2ve improved much, if any at all. I'm not sure why, but I tend to use a different technique every lesson (I try to, at least) But I don't know if that's a good thing or not. Sometimes my drawings can look like they were drawn by different people. Sometimes I draw the outline only, sometimes I build a skeleton for the figure, sometimes I try to draw the shadows only ...

On thing I learned, is to upload them every week on my blog and to use one sketchbook only, with dates written on the top. I hope my work can be assesed with ease despite the confusing timeline, I'm really sorry about the mess.

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Life Drawings Part 3 - I tend to put my minute drawing more instead of teh longer ones, because I like them more. For some reason, if I rush things and don't really think about it, they turn out better and more natural. If I sit down and go into details, they lose their soul. I don't know why, maybe it's just me.

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Life Drawing Part 2 

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Life drawings part 1 - Not only I have a habit of not writing the date on my drawings, I also use multiple skecthbooks and sometimes draw on single papers. Naturally, most of the drawings are now in a mess and altough I did my best to put them in order as much as I can remember, I’m still probably not accurate. But from what I can remember, these are the earlier ones in this semester. 

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Before and after images of my 16 mm film strips.

I kind of didn’t know what I was doing and I probably ruined some of them. But I have no way of knowing because I haven’t received their video version yet. It’s been ages since I sent them, I really don’t know why they haven’t arrived back to Guy yet. 

For now, I only have these photos.

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While I’m working on the animation, I was also working on this big background. This is probably the biggest background for the one min film, and im glad I was able to finish it finally.

I’m still unsure about how exactly I’m going to animate it.

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Wanted to share some progress from one of the scenes for the One Min Film. Some scenes are easy, and some of them are frustrating. This scene is one of them. But now that the rough is halfway finished, I hope it will look ok when I do the lines...

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My process for the animation so far... Very few. It’s going a little slow, pre-production stage took (and is taking) so much more time than animating. But I realised I can do it much faster if I don’t bother with the clean-up. I know that I want a sketchy, rough look for the lineart, so I’m trying to do everything first try to keep that feeling. So far it’s going great, my hand is used to it. I hope to finish all the animation and most of the coloring for the hand-in.

I’m doing all the animation in Photoshop, as usual. I tried TvPaint as well, but I’m really really used to Photoshop and it’s tools. I don’t want to waste more time learning TvP for this project. One trick I do to prevent lagging in Photoshop, is that I animate on green screen, then put the animation on top of the moving background later in Premiere. This way PSD doesn’t have to render the background and/or other things, I can save everything separately.

I’m sure there is an easier way, but this is my solution for now and it is working fine.

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Some of the moving backgrounds. Trying to give the “waves” and “light beams” effect was surprisingly very hard, even though it looks very simple. I probably would’ve done much more animation if it weren’t for these backgrounds, they take so much time because I keep re-considering everything. Color, shadows, effects ect .. But I think this way it looks better as a result. Now that I somewhat know what I’m going for, I hope the rest of them will be easier.

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Final animatic I’m submitting for the Pre Production 2 hand-in. 

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Some backgrounds for my One Min Film. I got some feedback for them, so there will be slight changes for the final animation. I am also thinking about changing their screen ratios- we’ll see, I don’t really know what I’m doing.

Pastel colored ones are for the “real life” part of the animation, bright colored one is for the “dream” part.