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.