SNACK TIME online

Going back in time, back to my animation project "SNACK TIME"

WATCH IT ON YOUTUBE CLICK HERE!

I got 'er done before my birthday and last night I uploaded it to youtube for your viewing pleasure.

There was lots of processing and outputting to be done since I last posted about this project so there are a lot of additions and improvements. Based on my limited time to finish the piece remaining, I had to remove the camera moves and lighting in 3D on all the flat scenes because the render time was outrageous! There were more food characters and whales to be animated and seeded, it may be something I have to go back and revisit. Otherwise I am happy the piece is done. There was a huge learning curve and I have a far better idea how to do a grant project like this. Special thanks to Cosmic Lurkn (click here for his Soundcloud) for the underlying soundtrack.

Snack Time, process is like eating

I continued on with the boy piece.

I ended up changing the initial order of events and made him eat a popcorn box of characters then follow it up with drinking the soda. This will become the impetus for the internal melting to skeleton stuff which I have to now move around a realign once everything with the boy melting layer is in place.

I also made a list of all the stuff I still needed to draw for the cartoon. I went to the studio  and put a couple of hours in drawing more stuff from a ketchup character to additional movie monster silhouettes to be added to the theatre portion. I still need to go and put in some time drawing more whales so that I can go into QAS and do some scanning at the start of the week.  There are still major areas I have not quite figured out but will come together as the animation develops further.

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While in the studio I also blocked in the figure for the Kali painting. Today when I go into the studio, I will not only draw more things for the animation, I will block in the figure and background with the first pass of my darks.

Snack time, but not time for a break

It may be gorgeous outside, but I am in an art prison, slave to my computer system so that I can get this project completed by the preferred date, my Birthday.

I am getting to the nitty gritty parts and the details. I started animating the characters faces within the walks. I spent most of the session working on the many elements that make up the theatre scene. I also compiled a list of artwork that still needs to be completed and tackled tonight so that I may scan and process them on Monday.

I spent the majority of time creating this theatre scene. the theatre and chairs are constructed in 3D space in After Effects so that later on, I can have a camera fly thru it. I plan on adding more movie monster characters as well as noisy theatre sounds, popcorn being chewed, coughing, shsssing etc. The audio will really help to fatten up the scene. It looks great in HD, but draft version is needed for this blog.

I hope to get this scene pretty much wrapped up today. This is the work done so far. I need to get the arms movies and the throat swallowing. I have a lot of timing to work out as well. Characters are going to reveal they are not walking on a red carpet but are in fact entering his mouth. Its the popcorn and soda that cause the skin to melt off the character.

More to come ;)

Snack time - making progress

Yesterday's full day session proved to be very effective.

I made a bunch of test movies to see them in real time and to give myself reference points of where to animate.

I made null joints on all the puppets and animated a variety of short loops to be tweaked and added to other compositions. Still works in process you can see some of the progress I made on my animation.

Here is a rocket ship made up of the body with a wiggle parameter on the scale and position property. I added the three tubes to the bottom and anchored them to a null object at the centre of the rocket ship body. Each flame is parented to each respective tube. The flames have sine wave effects put on them. The eyes of the character are anchored and have a different wiggle parameter on them. Later I will animate the rocket flying across the sky with a plume of smoke following the motion path behind it.

Here is a pink plane made by drawing, scanning and slicing up many parts in much and then assembling in After Effects the same way as the rocket ship above. I may make a new propellor and just have it flash on and off rather than how it is now. At about 15 seconds in there is a trap door in the back that opens and will drop some bombs over the landscape in the animation.

Here is a humpback whale that I animated that I will have floating up into the sky pulled by an air balloon and finally being dropped down into a movie theatre and squishing the the words "the end" or onto "intermission". I created null objects in the tail then put puppet pins on their left corners then used this piece of code as an expression for each:
n=thisComp.layer("name of null object") 

nullpos=n.toComp(n.anchorPoint);fromComp(nullpos); 

In this way, each pin on the object layer is attached to the named null object. I then created a hierarchy of the null objects by parenting them from one to another so that when I rotated one the others are affects along the hierarchy. 

Snack Time

No it hasn't been time to eat...

I've been slaving away all the while on finishing up an animation project I've been on for quite a while now. It is enough to make my hair grey.  Then while rendering out a test shot at lunchtime today................

CRACK!!!!

Enmax blew the electricity while they were working a block away!
I would have taken it as a sign to eat (ie SNACK TIME) and have a snack myself, but I couldn't heat  anything up.

 Since I haven't posted about it while I've been at it the last week, here is where the process has taken me so far:

I drew a bunch of stuff based on my storyboards.
I colored and created parts to be individually moved like paper cut outs.(see examples)
These drawings were scanned into photoshop and each drawing was digitally cut out and placed on a transparent background.
I imported over 100 of the individual drawings into after effects and began constructing timelines for the animation and assembling the puppets together.
I'm creating a bunch of long scenes with many moving parts and layers to tell the story as described in the treatment and storyboards.
After I test, time and render everything out of After Effects, I will then add the backgrounds and audio track consisting of individual sound effects synced to the visuals and a soundtrack. This will be done in my trusty Final Cut Suite.
The final part will be to output it and burn a playable DVD.

The beauty of Adobe After Effects is the way you can do just about anything in terms of animating visuals. It may get complicated but I just have to keep remembering to stick to the plan and not get lost getting mucky with crazy additional visual effects and stuff.

K.I.S.S.

I have to have the entire piece edited to sound and burned to DVD with a report by September 15. No exceptions!!!

Animation is by no means quick and easy so the next week is not one I am really looking forward to! Keep wishing me good luck, my fingers are crossed!