Flash & After Effects

Forgot to mention that before I started on the non linear animation that I had been working through a Flash & After Effects book. It's a good book for Flashites who are trying to learn After Effects. Sparodically I have worked through the chapter tutorials that were appropriate to me. It is called 'Flash + After Effects' [Chris Jackson, Focal Press] and it's been helpful to me, as I'm new to After Effects. It comes with a DVD with all the Chapter files on it so that you can complete the tutorials. Below is the first tutorial that I completed from Chapter 1. Some of it is basic stuff, but it includes a range of techniques that are good to learn.

Below are a couple of other tutorials: one from Chaper 3 and one from Chapter 7. The Swashbuckler from Chapter 3 uses the puppet tool to create a sequence of png's to import into Flash and the Fairy (Chaper 7), uses parenting & Expressions and the bubble effect for the fairy dust.

New thoughts

By stepping away from the non linear animation & having time to reflect - I've had some good ideas to enhance it. I'm going to add some rotoscope to the passers by. When I add to it, I will upload the newer version.

I'm off out to get a scanner so that I can scan in some of my sketches - I've been too long without one... madness.

I have uploaded a website based around the next animation ~ The Lockless Door.  The gallery is playing up though, so I will need to make adjustments to that. Not sure what happened there... it was working fine when I last closed Flash (or so I thought).

2D animation developments

Finally started the summer break (well sort of - still loads of prep work to do for the new academic year..), whinge, whinge :D. It has given me a few days to focus on the non-linear time & space animation though. I cut the footage down a lot from the original, but in doing so, I lost some funny moments that occured during filming that I could have played around with - but I made a choice with what I cut out and stuck with it and also learnt a few techniques within Premiere along the way (putting in keyframes, speeding up & slowing down sections). The footage is still too long - but I really didn't feel that I could cut much more from it.

The Ten Bells

I did some research on the 'Ten Bells' pub (where I shot the footage) & was surprised to find out the history behind it. It was once called 'Jack the Ripper'. Apparently Mary Kelly (the final victim of the notorious 'Jack the Ripper'), was last seen in the pub before she was murdered. I got slightly side tracked by the whole Jack the Ripper story and went on the Met History web pages regarding the facts and fiction behind the murders; this has culminated on many a conversation regarding the theories around the murders; but back to the animation....


I learned a lot of lessons from the previous filming. Number one was to USE A TRIPOD! Stupid mistake on the other filming that ended up a huge problem when trying to mask & everything is moving around. It made everything ten times longer to do - this was not something I was going to repeat! Also, it is so important to edit the footage, rather than just take the film, then plonk it in Flash to use - not good either, it just doesn't provide much impact. I would have liked to play around in Premiere more to create more blends & overlays, but time is of essence as always & I needed to crack on, so once I cut the film up & manipulated its speed I took it into Flash. I have now run out of time, but I will go back to this animation to add a lot more & tweak what I have already done, because although I wanted this to be disjointed, it could flow better & needs more time given to it.  I have added a few little things that are more subtle & that may only be noticed on a second viewing. There are numerous sequences that I worked on that I scrapped as they didn't work well, and as I've mentioned, I would like to work on it a quite a bit more, and hope to do so before returning to work as there are gaps where more animation is needed.

It's been so long!

I was shocked to see the last time I had posted an entry! It has been crazily manic at work since Christmas & the time has flown, but still, that's a shockingly long gap!


I'm still ploughing through the MA. Currently I'm working on an animation based on: Non linear time & space. I went to Spitalfields on Sunday (a few weeks ago) for a recce and took some time lapse photography with a lovely camera that one of my students lent me (Panasonic HDC-HS700) - it was on a beautiful, sunny & hot day but was a nightmare travelling on the train... I got some footage, but it was only 3 seconds long even though I took the photos continuously for around 40 minutes (by then the battery ran out). I went to Spitalfields again last Sunday (another hot one), and on the suggestion of a fellow tutor I took an hour of film with a College camera, so that I could speed it up & slow it down in Premiere or Final Cut.


During my venture to Spitalfields, I stumbled across an excellent artist/illustrator, his name is Tom Lewis, I asked him if he had ever thought about animating his characters & he told me that a studio was currently interested in doing that, so I will keep a look out on his website for the animation (www.tomlewis.co.uk). I also thought he would be a great person to come in & talk to the students about character design. See a couple of examples of his illustrations below:

........Back to the filming - I had found a pub on a corner (the previous Sunday), that had real character, but I took it from a different angle this time and got a bit closer to aim more at the passers by in more detail. I had a bit of trouble with Premiere, as I have not used it before. I couldn't work out how to capture the footage as I am so used to using digital rather than mini dv tape. I spoke to Suzanne from Media, at work and she explained how to capture the footage and I finally got somewhere. I did a search on the Internet for how to speed up & slow down the footage & found a good video tutorial: http://layersmagazine.com/time-remap-in-premiere-pro.html  - after viewing the tutorial, it was straightforward to speed up and slow down sections of footage. [I will put the footage up here at some point, so that the before and after can be viewed]. I am now working on the characters that I want to place into the animation. I was pretty lucky with the footage as there are quite a few appropriate moments that I can get the animated characters to interact with the passers by. This makes a refreshing change as prior to this I was working on a mixed media animation that just would not go right.....


I had a digital video camera bought for me for Christmas (with a hard drive), so I ventured out just after the snow cleared to take some footage - while I was filming, I slipped and hurt my dodgy arm - then I had sooooo much trouble getting the footage from the camera, I spent most of the Christmas hols trying to sort it out, then when I did get the footage, the quality was awful :( I then took it into After Effects...... another new venture for me...... and I tried to enhance it as much as I could and tried to keep going with making this animation. In the meantime I took the offending video camera back because I was not impressed - but kept persevering with creating some characters and experimenting with the masking techniques in Flash to incorporate the 2D with the live footage. I had such a mare with that as well. I was making movie clip animations and could not work out why the masking wasn't working????? It took so many hours of wasted time to realise that I had to turn the movie clips into graphic symbols as for some reason masking will not work with those movie clips!!! Aaaaaagh.... so much time wasted on that! Another thing I found out from working with this animation is that Flash couldn't cope if I put the footage into a movie clip. It went comotose and kept spinning the little circle for eternity - I had wanted to zoom into the film within Flash - but Flash Said NO!! Anyway, suffice to say that even after so much time and effort the animation was as flat as a pancake - so I am now relieved to leave it behind and move on with something new! The only salvation is that some of the masking is good and it has helped me to develop the use of masking, so I'll be brave and put the animation here, even though it is dire - it shows the techniques I was working on.

Here are some ideas that I had for this; from my sketchbook:

 

 

Publish Post

Flash CS4

I am currently spending far too much time learning the new tools in Flash CS4! Also, because I am also a College lecturer (as well as being an MA student myself), I am having to update all my handouts for Flash..... time consuming stuff. I have been using Flash 8 and have jumped to the new version and its mind blowing how much new stuff there is to get my head around - Inverse Kinematics, the new motion editor, 3D tool, to name a few. I have also been playing with Camtasia, a recording software to create video tutorials.  I only downloaded the free trial, but I think its worth getting the full version because it's a great tool and will be quicker than creating step by step handouts with screenshots! I am also dipping my toes into After Effects.... its just finding the time to absorb it all! :)

Characterising yourself

For one of our weekly assignments at Uni, we were asked to attempt to characterise ourselves, so I thought I'd be brave and post my attempts.....

I tried to portray mood with the drawings at the top. The side profile ones make me think of medusa.... I don't really see myself as a snake headed monster though.....






As this was a short project, this was my final sketch. I wonder if I was subconsciously inspired by Betty Boop or even Holly Hobby from the 70's.

I know this needs more time given to it, but I have been sidetracked by the theory work and trying to do some animations.... and most of all the demands of work at College....

Lev Manovich discusses the icons of memesis

In an article entitled: 'Reality' effects in computer animation, Lev Manovich discusses what he calls, the icons of memesis.

To suggest the idea of progress of computer graphics towards realism, researchers privilege particular subjects that culturally connote the mastery of mimetic representation.

Historically, the idea of mimesis has been connected with the success in illusionistic representation of certain subjects. The original episode in the history of Western painting is the story of the competition of Zeuxis and Parrhasiuss. The grapes painted by Zeuxis symbolise his skill to create living nature out of inanimate matter of paint. Further examples in the history of art include the celebration of the mimetic skill of those painters who were able to simulate another symbol of living nature - the human flesh.

While the painting tradition had its own iconography of subjects connoting mimesis, moving image media relies on a different set of subjects. Steven Neale (1985) describes how early film demonstrated its authenticity by representing moving nature:

"What was lacking [in photographs] was the wind, the very index of real, natural movement. Hence the obsessive contemporary fascination, not just with movement, not just with scale, but also with waves and sea spray, with smoke and spray".

Computer graphics researchers resort to similar subjects to signify the realism of animation.

This search for realism is associated more with 3D animation than 2D animation; as there seems to be a quest for more and more realism within 3D, whereas within 2D there is more of a blend of traditional and digital skills. This perpetual pursuit for realism within 3D, doesn't always work with the viewer as they can feel unnerved by this ultra realism within animation, edging towards the perverse feeling within the 'uncanny valley'. Beowulf (2007) has been attributed with this phenomenon, as the prominent actors, such as Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie and Ray Winstone have been emulated through 3D animations with the use of Motion Capture. There is a debate as to whether some animators consider Motion Capture as 'animation', and a big debate as to whether this animation is ultra realistic or not. Half of a group of students who went to see this film at imax, thought it was absolutely amazing and half thought it was awful. Some thought that although the CGI was realistic, it was also soulless. There was confusion with the realism and the awkwardness of the 'acting'. As the characters were so realistic, more was expected of the 'acting', and this was why they interpreted the characters as impassive and wooden - because their expectations were higher due to the animation being closer to reality than they are accustomed to. Ultimately, this led to an element of disorientation when viewing the animation.

I do not agree with the concept that Motion Capture is not animation, because the animators work tremendously hard on animating into the captured footage in order to achieve the final product, but I have to agree that the characters do come across as soulless. The human attribute that is so elusive...... the spirit of the individual will continue to be problematic for the animators to capture, whilst attempting to create this sought after hyper realism.