Testing audio

I found that the audio went well with the bit of animation that I had, and discovered how to add audio to dragon, and export with audio from dragon, becuase people kept having problems but I found out that all you have to do is press sound and it then it will be exported with an audio.

Test Animation

I wasn't really going to make a test animation however I wanted to see of the skip could work and I felt like it did.

Skipping Reference

This is one of the skipping references I found and I thought it was very good and that the animation was fluent and is kind of what I want to do for my animation.

This reference reminded of a picture that I saw a while back, because the character looked the same so I researched it and found a picture that looks simimlar, however overall I found the animation was exactly what I wanted to do.

Here is the reference that looks similar to the video above and is what my animation will be based on.

Character Reference

 This alien looks too goofy for the idea that I have becuase of the teeth but the oval eyes, the skinny arms, big body and big feet maybe an idea I could use to put onto my character.

This picture is looks similar to the one above and I will incorporate the same ideas from the first picture and the second picture (big head)

With this picture it stands out to me becuase I think that it looks more alien than most pictures and also becuase its done digitally, even though it is squidward from spongebob.



This picture is what I had in mind when designing my character with the long head, thin arms and big belly however I will add longer legs to so that I can animate the character skipping. 

Overall I think that all the aliens above look generally the same and this could either be becuase of copying so when a random person looks at the character they can already recgonise that it is an alien type thing or that what people perspective of what an alien is.

11 second animation (ideas)

For the 11 second animation there is a big variety to choose from and so far I have chosen 3:

1.      This one’s sounds like there is a mother shouting at a little girl “Don’t you ever!!” and is very angry at the little girl as you can hear in the voice. For this animation my idea will be having a mom shout at a young teenager he is sitting in the corner of the room, the mother will either have its head chopped off e.g. cow and chicken, tom and jerry etc.

2.      This audio was talking about TV, “TV is power, the power to love and testify”, for this animation I will either animate what’s on the TV or the actual TV itself.

3.       This audio clip was just plain and had no speaking in it, but from the sound of it, it sounds like the person/s are jolly/ exciting etc. For this animation I was thinking to have someone skipping down a street.

Anticiapation Completed!!!

(Video distorts becuase of blogger) 

Generally this animation so far was the trickiest for me however I did enjoy the challenge of animating a jump. The reason why this task was difficult for me was because I am used to setting key frames on Maya and then the frames before will be handled by the software and in traditional animation I had to work out every single frame. If I had to do anything more for this task I will have gathered more research so when my I did my jump animation it would look better and I will have research to back it.

Next time I do a task that requires a jump or any kind of long distance movement I will carry out test animations so I can identify what frames need to be done in between the key frames so when I do the real animation it will look better. At the end of the animation I attempted to do a skid, and I thought that it did look good however with sound it isn’t as good plus I think it will look better if it was in perspective.

The principles that were used in this animation were anticipation, timing and spacing. Anticipation was used throughout the animation mostly at the beginning of the animation where the character jumps and swings its arm back to front because he is standing in a stop so a swing is necessary and so is bending the knees (as shown in the reference).  The spacing in my animation is decent up to a point on when the character jumps and in mid-air and looks like a couple of frames have been skipped, however the timing of the whole animation was fine.

Exaggeration Completed!!!

(Video distorts becuase of blogger)

Overall I thought that my animation which was based on exaggeration was really good and flowed really well evem when the animation was looped. If I had to make any changes on my animation the only thing I will do is add more expressions so it will look better and more longer. This task I thought would of been hard becuase I'm so used to drawing from a perspective rather than a straight on face, however in the end I took on the task hands on and found it was rather simple.

When taking on this task I had found a technique from just being lazy, and this is was when I drawn my animation up to a point of the final expression I wanted the face to go back to normal, so rather than drawing the frames again I used the drawn faces I had already done leading up to the final expression and just reversed it. This technique had its advantages because it saved me quite a bit of time, which is essentional when working in the industry when working towards deadlines and also made my animation smoother becuase there was no out place facial features for when stretching the face in the final expressions.

The animation prinicples which I used was were exaggeration, timing, spacing and stretch and squash. When exaggerating my character I made him have big oval eyes and a big nose that dropped below the jaw of the character. When stretching my character I made it animate so that its face stretched so you were able to see the mouth then squashed it back to its normal face. The timing and spacing was used really well in this animation because of the spacing of esch frame it made the whole animation smooth and the timing was the right speed so everything complimented each other.

Anticipation video reference

My jump will sort of similar to the video sense in when he takes of and the way the arms move.

This is the sort of skid that I will put innto my animation at the end of the jump.

Exaggeration (reference)

These are references of how exaggeration can be expressed using the animation principles squash and stretch, as you can see with the pictures when they are laughing the head/ mouth will be stretched and when some characters are in a mood (upset) there face will be squashed.