Monday, August 30, 2010

Week 7 Tut: MUSIC!!!

Yep, so this week's tut was for us to mess around with some music and stuff, and create some elements that will change according to the music...

Messed around a bit with some of the stuff Paul showed us in class... and added that Audio Wave thingy for the fun of it.

The track is Square 1 by Jemex from their album, From There To Here. It's available under Creative Commons License at http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/19298

This is just a simple animation. Enjoy the track though, I think it's real good~.



Sunday, August 29, 2010

New Discovery!!!

I still remember the first lecture. I went in, I sat down, and I panicked.

Coz I've never done Animation / Motion Graphics before.

I can't even make my stick man walk in flash animations.

So.

I REALLY (like really really) PANICKED.

Thought I was gonna screw up for sure.

 And ...

6 weeks later...

My first assessment due.

And I COULD ANIMATE STUFF!!!!!

So yeah... I'm not that bad at animated stuff after all... =p... although I could definitely do much much better.

I guess having taken the time to explore AE and messing around with some of the functions, animation using AE isn't too hard, just time consuming, like all other design related stuff (even photoshop can be extremely time consuming).

I wouldn't say I'm a fast learner, though I think I managed to pick up AE in quite a reasonably short amount of time, probably due to the fact that this time, I actually have some sort of guidance, unlike previously when I taught myself everything I knew on Illustrator and Photoshop.

Looking forward to the rest of the tuts and the final assessment!

I've kind of gotten a rough idea of where I wanna head towards with the final assessement. Since I've got all these drawings lying around waiting to be turned into a book or something. I bet my muses wouldn't mind either. Plus, there's that added benefit of not having to trawl through the net looking for Creative Commons images to use. =)

Since my first assessment is about didi dreaming, my final shall be about the first ever character in my drawing series: iki!

I'm gonna tell iki's story in 2 mins. Doable? Definitely. First step? Find paper ball animation stuff online (I wanna open the scene with a paper ball un-crumpling itself).

Thursday, August 26, 2010

dream.


Yeah!! I finished my animation assessment!! here's the completed vid! 
(p/s: updated the link to the vimeo one instead of blogger version)

Monday, August 23, 2010

Week 6 Tut!!!

Ooo... Graffiti!!!

I like street art. Graffiti is street art. And now I get to do my own "Graffiti" on AE!!!

Not too hard, just tedious. But hey, at least I won't get into trouble with this particular Graffiti piece.



Credits: 
"Joaquin Phoenix is a Poser" graffiti: http://www.streetsofdublin.com/wp-urban/archives/62154



Drawing Swirls...

I know I wanna do a drawing thing-a-magic with my assessment, and, after exploring the write-on animation effect Paul told me about, found it a bit tedious that I've got to add a text layer and all before I can do my drawing.

So, decided to hunt around for more info on how to do that drawing thingy...

And came across this site:
http://layersmagazine.com/animated-swirls-in-adobe-after-effects.html

Simple instructions, simple way to do my drawing thing!

Here's a practice vid to show how it looks like after following all the steps...




Friday, August 20, 2010

Inspiring Animation

Really liked this motion graphic piece. Loved the message it sent, and it's got some styles that I'd like to use in my piece!


Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Week 5 Tut: Duck & Cover (and hell)

When I saw what we were gonna be doing for tut this week, I got really really excited. Until I actually started doing it. Because then it wasn't fun. Because it was tedious. And I hate the cyclist in my video now. He was horrible to animate. *faints*


 All graphics used in this video are original!!!

At this point, I'm saluting all the people who animate stuff daily and provide us with all that wonderful animations... because I think I could die if I had to do this everyday.

As fun as creating animations & motion graphics can be, it's really tedious work. You burn hours and even days trying to get this stuff out, and at the end, it's a really short clip compared to how much time you actually spent getting it to work well.

One of the issues I had was the cyclist. It looked and worked fine in the raw composition, but once I exported it, that lil' bugger SHRANK. Up till now I have no idea what happened during the export process. I wound up rendering the raw animation without the sound first, then re-exporting it with the sound added, and it was alright. So I guess that's good.