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Assignment Write up [4/3/13] - What's Due?

There is a lot due today. Our final projects are due. I have completely finished the Argle Bargle circus except for one specific shot with the lion tamer cracking his whip. I wasn't exactly sure how to animate it in After Effects. I didn't really run into any other technical problems. The only sound I have right now is just my scratch track. There is going to be other sounds that I collect in my sound class. I am going to have my friend Kelly Cook narrate the piece as well as collect some sounds for the crowd and a presence track for outside and under the tent.



We were supposed to do a demo reel edit. Mine is very short. I have two versions because I have one video that was already compressed and I could not find the files to render it as an animation.


This is the reel without that video. However, it is a strong video and it's a shame that I can't use it.


Also due today was our information about our meeting with Carrie Brooks. Unfortunately I didn't manage my time correctly to meet with her yet but I did schedule one. And lastly our final revisions on our resumes are due today.

Narration

Narration

Act 1

In the Argle Bargle circus where the circus people play
New and fun adventure happen each and everyday
Let's see what our friends are up to in the Argle Bargle way
Ah, what a lazy bunch we have come upon
What are you guys doing? Just lazing in the sun?
Oh Martha and Marcus! Are you falling asleep?
Senor and Raion too
Even Elle and Rosie!
But Mindy, not mindy
Because as you should know
Mindy that day wanted to put on a show
But to the others the idea was...ah...no
The ringmaster softly explained to his daughter
That there wasn't a soul to even do a show for
Poor Mindy, it's okay, there'll be other days
But wait!
Mindy what are you doing running around?
What's all the paper strewn on the ground?
With you posters in hand and full of joy too
Just what do you have planned for our Argle Bargle crew?

Act 2

Wow look at all the posters, Mindy did a great job
But passing them out might be harder than she thought
Psst! Mindy someone's coming, try handing it out
The man took the paper
then laughed with a shout
No one would ever pay to see a circus so lame!
The man cried out while his laughter he tamed
He walked away grinning, his chuckles insincere
Oh don't worry Mindy, I'm sure you'll get an
Idea?!
Mindy called a crewman and whispered her scheme
She would gather an audience by any means
As Mindy climbed the ladder, her nerves she did prep
She took a deep breath
Then she took her first step
A crowd gathered below as she steadily made her way
Mindy did a small trick and it blew them away
But as she prepared to come down from her pose
Something horrible happened right under her nose
Don't look at the ground mindy! It's not as close as you'd hope
Mindy wobbled in fear and she fell from the rope
The crowd screamed and cried, even let out a yelp
Mindy, hanging for dear life, Hurry call out for help!

Act 3

Mindy hung on tightly though her hands were still slipping

But a man int he crowd saw a sight so uplifting

It was the troupe running forth to save Mindy!

Senor cracked his whip like never before

And raion let out a fantastical roar

Which scared Rory, Rosie, and Jack half to death

they lifted their trucks which rose Elle, Stelle, and Beth

When Marcus and Martha joined into the climb

They hoisted the Ringmaster up just in time

The crowd was ecstatic the Mindy was alright!

Oh what joy! For it is a fact

that you have a great audience to see your new act!

And I know that it's surely safe to say

That our friends will do great things in the Argle Bargle way!

Act 1 - Narration

Assignment Write-up [4/25/13]

This was another progress report. In the last class I was given the suggestion to narrate the project like some children cartoons. For research I watched children's programs such as Pocoyo, How to Goof Cartoons, Curious George, Babar, and Caillou. I liked specifically in Pocoyo how the Narrator didn't just narrate the story but also interacted with the characters, asking them questions and helping them when they needed help. So I decided to do that in my narration. I also made it rhyme which honestly was by accident and completely unintentional.

Assignment Write-up [4/18/13]

This is assignment is just a progress report of our final project. This is the first act of my project Argle Bargle's fantastical circus. The scenes for the second and third act are set-up but the first act is the only one that i have fully animated right now. A lot of things were added in during the animation progress. I decided to make some unique backgrounds for Mindy during her single shots as well as some new characters and designs. So the process of making this took a little longer than expected. I ran into a little technical issue with Mindy's arms. It seemed to distort really badly once I began rotating it on an axis. I haven't figured out why but I don't think it's too noticeable to be distracting. There are also some issues with joints showing and some craft issues in the making of the characters that I will fix once everything is done and I go back into the meticulous process of editing.

Argle Bargle's Fantastical Circus - Act 1

Argle Bargle Characters

Showgirl

Lion Tamer

Clown Brother

Clown Sister

Lion

Elephant

Storyboard and Breakdown

Breakdown

Act 1

 Inciting incident - Ringmaster shows Mindy the empty audience and the broken down circus

Plot point #1 - Mindy makes the flyers

Act 2

Midpoint - Mindy drops the balancing stick and starts to wobble/fall

Plot point #2 - Mindy screams for help

Act 3

Climax - The troupe comes together to create the human pyramid

Denouement - They use the pyramid as their closing act and gain an audience

Storyboard

Concept Art - Style and Color ideas

This was my original style that I had for my previous works. It was supposed to be styled like a coloring book or a children's book. At first I wanted to keep this style...

...so I decided to just design Mindy since I already had all of the other characters designed in this style. This is the sketch that I had for Mindy. 

But I began to think about the sort of retro style that people often used in like futuristic type drawings and began looking up not only that retro style but also some vintage circus posters. 

Also I looked up some images of the circus in the 30s-40s since that is the time in which my narrative is set. 

                                       

I then used the retro stylistic illustration and the limited and muted color pallet of the vintage circus posters to create a redesign for Mindy.

Final Project Concept

Elevator Line

A young girl challenges fears, embraces bravery, and evokes wonder when she attends an extravagant performance at Argle Bargle's Fantastical Circus. 

Explanation of Theme

Fear is often greater than the danger itself.

Explanation of Tone and Execution

I want this to have a very playful and childlike tone because 

1) the main character is a very young child

2) I want to appeal to more childlike fears like fear of clowns or the "freaks" at the circus

I'm going to achieve this by making the entire short seem like it's out of a children's coloring book with a very childlike coloration and design. 

Explanation of Objective

The goal is to mostly entertain but I do want to enlighten my intended on audience of the concept that fear is only as deep as this mind allows and that you should often face/overcome fears.

Target Audience

My target audience is mostly children at a young age that would be thoroughly entertained but also at on old enough age to understand the message I wanting to convey. I want to saw for children as young as four or five, and possibly for young adults as well. 

Final Project Concepts

For my final project I want to do three shorts all using different animation methods. The shorts will be no longer than 2 minutes.

For the first piece I want to edit Argle Bargle's Fantastical Circus so that the movements are more realistic, fix any issues, make it more appealing, and to finish the scenes that I wanted to do. This piece is mostly animated by After Effects.



For the second piece I want to do an all traditionally drawn animation. The idea I have for this is inspired by a royalty-free song called There It Is. It would be an opening for a cartoon called the Funky Bunch, a 70's based spy team. The opening would just consist of introducing the Funky Bunch members: Al-Fro, Psychedelia, and Dyno-Mike.

The third piece I want to do is a stop motion animation. The idea I have for this is inspired by another song called Fluffing a Duck.  A family of ducks walk along a stretch of land covered in holes because they are home to a colony of gophers. They are on their way to the pond. The three baby ducks constantly jump down the holes in curiosity only to be popped back up by the gophers. Mama duck scolds them and they walk sadly along. However, once again something catches their eyes and they scurry down the holes again. Mama ducks sees her babies missing and freaks out when suddenly an angry old gopher pops up and chucks the babies at her, angry they were disturbing his home. The baby ducks smile at the adventure and Mama duck is just glad they're okay.

What I want from these pieces is pretty much what I achieved with my Paint Sample stop motion animation, just a few feel good pieces that entertain. I also want to try as many different animation styles to see which one(s) I like the best. The idea to do three shorts though is a little too much given our time frame so I would love to hear which idea you guys think is best to help me narrow down my choices.

All of the music I acquired from Imcompetech created by Kevin MacLeod and are free for use as long as credit is given.

Assignment Write-up [3/5/13]

This assignment was to edit or projects into a complete and final piece. I decided to re-do mine entirely with a better camera. I also used colored card stock to make my background and characters instead of printing them out so that the colors would appear more prismatic and make the editing process a lot easier. I didn't face any kind of technical difficulties with this project and I believe it is fairly successful.

DAD - Final Project

Assignment Write-Up [2/28/13]

For this assignment I decided to go do a commercial for a fake paint company called Pixel Paints. The idea behind the making of this piece is to comment on how companies will take anything that makes people happy, bottle it up, and sell it. They use these ploys to appeal to human emotions and trick people into buying their products to achieve that emotional satisfaction. For example how paint sample card are labelled with elaborate names like "Brilliant Sea," "Sea Foam Green," "Yellow Brick Road,: etc. in order to appeal to us to buy. To achieve this I created a stop motion animation using a background that looks like a paint sample card. I labeled the colors of the characters with their corresponding numerical and alphabetical code to show that though there may be three different characters with the same color white, the codes are entirely different  This is the same ruse used by paint companies.
The only technical issues I ran into with this was that I didn't realize how bad my father's camera was until it was too late to do the entire sequence over again. So the images are not the best that they could be. I tried to edit them the best that I could.

DAD Final Idea

Okay so I think I have the final idea of what I want to do for the DAD/ADA project. I want to create an animation using DAD but the animation is going to be pixels like a 8-bit video game. It's going to be a fairly simple animation probably not over 5 secs.

Content

The idea behind the making of this piece is to comment on how companies will take anything that makes people happy, bottle it up, and sell it. They use these ploys to appeal to human emotions and trick people into buying their products to achieve that emotional satisfaction. For example, paint sample cards. When you go buy paint and you see the little samples like these
that have those little numbers at the bottom and the name of the colors. These colors vary so little and are named so extravagantly in order to appeal to people's likes and to force them to buy. Like these for example
people would look at this and think "Oh! Brilliant Sea? Well, I love the sea. It makes me happy." So they would buy 520B-6 a.k.a "Brilliant Sea" that is literally just a little more saturated than liquid blue, or the blue they already have on their walls, but they will paint their rooms "Brilliant Sea" because it's called "Brilliant Sea"' and seas make them happy.

Project 

My project is to create an animation that depicts the actual physical objects that are used by the companies in their marketing campaigns. I have multiple ideas but for one I wanted to depict a sunrise however instead of a realistic photo, I would use actual paint sample layout and numbered colors to create the sunrise. For this process I would:
D - digitally take picture of a sunrise or sunset. Upload those pictures and use Photoshop to extract the exact code for a certain amount of particular colors
A - draw the animation sequence by hand
D - scan all of the frames into the computer, add the colors and their respective codes into them and edit them as needed, and lastly animate.

A sunrise isn't really the only thing I want to animate but I really wanted to get feedback and ideas from anyone on how I can make this concept better or different/ more effective ways that I could get my point across.

Edit
I decided for this project that  I would do ADA. The video will consist of four elements, a sunrise, the ocean, a sunset, and a beautiful night sky. For this process I will:
A - draw out the characters and scan them in
D - digitally edit, color, and animate them
A - print out all of the frames (12 per sec) and paste them onto a long wall or surface in sequence
This is basically a spin-off flip book and will have to be documented

Another thing I can do is a stop motion animation where I:
D - digitally create the characters
A - print them out and stop motion animate them
D - bring the pictures back into the computer to edit 

Brainstorming Ideas

Ideas for the ADA/DAD project:
(these are just mostly ideas for the entire outcome and not really what I want to use or draw or anything

• ADA - make one of those slide puzzles. I don't think that's what they're called, but they are the puzzles that have like 9 blocks and you have to slide the blocks to form a picture. Slide Picture Puzzles. There we go. Thanks Google
• DAD - A music video or just a video of some kind, may be a fake documentary or bad soap opera, movie trailer, etc. (I'm not sure how that would work...)
• ADA - A painting or drawing
• DAD - a digital painting or drawing
• ADA - I kinda like the flip book idea
• ADA - a collage
• ADA - a viewmaster. Yeah, kicking it old school
• ADA - I have a specific idea in mind that could result in a paint color sampler like they have a home depot. 
• DAD - doing a video like the subway example. Pasting a sequence on a wall and taking a video of me driving past them all like a giant flip book
• Look at some of the optical toys on the website that Jill introduce and see if there are any more ideas that seem plausible in a wee

Video Tutorials that I tried

Shatterize

Energy

Old Film Look

Fly By Titles

Assignment Write-up [2/14/13]

For this assignment we learned the puppet tool. For the very first assignment I created a character that moved a little too organic than I could do with the tools I was just learning so I had the character tucked away for his specific assignment. However, I wasn't able to use her because I wasn't able to get her completely figured out in photoshop. She had to be only one layer and the way I wanted to portray her was causing some difficulty. So I decided to animate a blade of grass. I chose to animate grass because it moves in the same manner that a candle flame does which is what my character is. The movement was pretty simple enough to create however, there were many small issues that arose like excessive stretching  figuring out which pins needed toggle hold frames, making some areas be still using the starch, and figuring out what would move when and where. I know this could be greatly improved upon to make it look a lot smoother and to provide a lot less stretching.

Argle Bargle's Fantastical Circus - Theatrical Trailer

Assignment Write-up [2/4/13]

This assignment was DEALER'S CHOICE! We got to choose between continuing our earlier animations or starting a whole new idea using the tools that we now know in After Effects. For this assignment I chose to start another idea.
The main problem that I ran into was actually coming up with a simple idea. However, after looking at some royalty free music online, I came up with the idea of creating a narrative about a magical circus. I created all of the characters and wrote my shot list of all the scenes I needed. While scanning in my drawings, one of my classmates pointed out that the style in which I was drawing in made my characters look like they were in a coloring book. I immediately took to the idea and began rendering the characters in photoshop as a child would od in their own coloring book (albeit it is a lot nicer and cleaner but still there are certain messy parts and the markings that looks like crayons).
The biggest problem I faced with this was time management. I overestimated just how much time it would take and began to run out of it. The entire thing was supposed to be about two minutes but because of time issues and also technical issues, I decided to just make it a one minute trailer.
Some technical issues I ran into were lost footage ordeals. Once I transferred the file from my computer to the school's computer, some footage got lost and it was difficult for me to replace it because the animation began to mess up. I ended up having to cut out that scene entirely.
Another problem I faced was scaling to mimic camera motions. But I suppose that could be fixed by learning new techniques and tools.
All in all I would say that the trailer is good for the time I spent on it. I would definitely love to go back though and finish it as well as go through it with a fine tooth comb and put in the tiny movements or replacement animations that would make the actions seem more realistic.

Pepe le Mime and Elli the Elephant (edited)

Assignment Write-up [1/31/13]

This is basically just an edit based on critique. During critique I was told of a couple of layering issues that I easily fixed. I was also told that Pepe, the mime, was a little too flat and that he should act a little more. To fix that I added some blinking. The same was said for Elli so I created a sequence of hearts and some small royalty-free elephant noises to add to her cutie factor.
I ran into a lot of issues doing these edits but nothing too complicated that I couldn't work around of solve. There were just a lot of sequencing and timing issues I had with making all of the replacement animation. Also, I wanted Elli to move, but aside from completely redrawing her with moving joints, I couldn't figure out a more simple way to do it. But all in all I think it turned out to be a really successful piece and later I hope to do a lot more in-depth editing to make it a demo reel worthy piece.

Pepe le Mime and Elli the Elephant

Pepe Le Mime and Ellie the Elephant (and replacement bird)

1/29/13 - Assignment Write-up

Pepe Le Mime and Elli the Elephant

My process was fairly simple for this assignment. I created the Pepe and Ellie in 2 dimensional form, colored them, and scanned the into photoshop. I then separated all of the parts where the joints were into different layers. From that point on I just uploaded the file into AE and animated it.
Some challenges I faced were fairly difficult. At the beginning I had a hard time piecing together Pepe in photoshop. I also had a fairly difficult time figuring out his hand movements and making his hands match together on the rope. Afterwards I had a really difficult time figuring out where I should place the toggle holds so that everything wasn't moving at the same time. However once those issues where solved it was smooth sailing fromt there. 

Nina Flame

INT. BEDROOM - NIGHT

A young woman lights the last candle in her room. Romantic music fills the air as she exits.

From that candle wick grows a flame names NINA. She is a beautiful, young, and shy flame that glows a stunning array of white, yellow, orange, and blue. In her hands are two unlit matches and as she looks around, she notices all the other flames have begun their dance. 

• Character -  Nina, a young candle flame, lit to help set the mood for a romantic evening between two lovers. 
• Movement -  The swaying movement a candle flame makes
• Video Element -  Nina's lit matches. The video will be of actual candle flames 

Extra Credit

Old Extra Credit 

EXT. PARK - DAY

JAMES FULLER, 49, thinning hair and a beer gut. He is a recovering alcoholic just from an AA meeting. But the phone call he'd just received did nothing but put a beer in his hand. 

INT. RESTAURANT - DAY

AUDREY FULLER is a 53 year old woman who is often mistaken for much younger. She has a habit of being hit on by much younger men though her wedding ring shines brightly on her left hand. 

KIMBERLY NORTHCUTT, her daughter, is 34 and also married. She tries hard to calm her bouncing two year old son next to her, balance her newborn daughter on her lap, and keep down the rising irritation of her mother's pursuers.

EXT. PARKING GARAGE - NIGHT

A young woman named KELLEE' FULLER pants heavily. She is 22 and is trying her best not to slip on her long jeans as her flowing dress shirt billows behind her. 

Her hand closes tightly around a young boy names CHRISTOPER . He is 8 years old. His palms are sweaty and his hand keeps slipping away. 

KELLEE'

Hurry up Erica! She's gaining on us!

ERICA

I'm trying! I'm trying! 

Behind them is a young girl ERICA MARTIN. She is about 20 with long black hair, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. she runs barefoot after Kellee and Chris, her high heeled shoes in one hand and a large laptop in the other. 

New Extra Credit

EXT. PARK - DAY

ANGELA DENTON, 35, long streaked hair, professional pants suit. She sits on the park bench, tired from her long day as a principal of an elementary school. 

Next to her sits PARKER-NIA GORDON, 19, short bobbed hair, and a forlorn looks on her face. She watches her little cousin ANGELA CARTER play happily on a swing set though Parker herself is near tears. 

None of them know of the events about to unfold. 

INT. RESTAURANT - DAY

LILO HILLARD is a 19 year old girl fresh into college. Because she is part Hawaiian she was given the nickname of a cartoon character, but never bothers to introduce herself by her real name. 

MICHELLE CARTER, who is 45, sits across from Lilo in the restaurant booth. She has a very laid back demeanor and a kind smile though her visit to the restaurant is strictly business. 

EXT. PARKING GARAGE - NIGHT

A gun shot rings though the silence. 

A young girl called DANIELLE WHITE smiles as she fires two more bullets into neighboring cars. She is 10 years old but the psychotic glint in her eyes and smile on her face reveals her much older, and twisted, personality. 

DANIELLE

Come out, come out, wherever you are!