Carol Learns to Walk

Hi guys, This week was intense. I finally reached my goal of animating 10 seconds today, feel so proud. Not only that, I learned how to do a walk and talk cycle. At first I thought I had to animate a fresh walk cycle because the system didn't have Rachel and Oliver walking in suits yet. Turns out all I had to do was drag the symbol of them in suits into the file where they didn't have it and swap
the arms, body, legs with the ones I want. It allow me to explore other tools like the pencil tool, so I can fix and draw over some parts where it's needed.

The most complicated thing I learned this week was changing a certain part of the body parts into a new symbol on its own so that I could do actions while the character is walking. The reason why you must do that is because the walk cycle is already looped, so you have to break that loop in order to make something different happen. Basically you select the parts that you are going to be animating, for example if I want to move the arm when the character is walking, I will select only the arm. After that it must be copied/paste in a certain way into a new layer so that you can animate that layer inside another layer.

It is too complicated to even explain, but I had to write down every step when Rich was showing it to me because I couldn't remember it. So after you animate it's own action, you must match the body part to the beat of the walk so that the arm still looks attached to the rest of the body.

Sorry that I can't explain it properly...there is way too many steps lol.

Inna Moves Mountains

Last couple weeks I have been working on Bead Goose design and Animation(close up) and Bead Mountains design for First Hand stories. For my Goose design I didn't use only Gwich'in design patterns - I have been researching Native American art in general and found lots of Canadian Northwest coast based art which is much more stylized and looks much more in style of Alex’s wolf and Goose(full shot). Here’s what I came up with and some of the research:

My Bead Mountains design I based on Gwich'in floral patterns. At first I took some pieces from my Mandala Design and was trying to make it work but in the end it didn’t look good. It was all messy and chaotic. We liked blue flowers though and Alex suggested to fill the space below with some design elements.

 

When I did more research I managed to come up with a nicer wave-like pattern that worked better, and I also added

a new flower design in the middle of each mountain to improve the overall look.

Here's my ugly version

 

Here's my research

 

And here’s my final version and I already animated the mountains, it took a while but I learned how to apply transparency to the movie clips and how to make camera moves more smoothly: http://youtu.be/cGcys8LvfOk

Excited to start animating Alex’s sleigh but first I need to come up with an alternative sparkle animation, already found a tutorial for it, yey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUKXfoubkEI

Anna's Summer Focus: Environmentalism

This week, I've again, been working on First Hand BGs. However, on Friday, I have finally been assigned to the interactive project I've been waiting for~

It's truly exciting and right up my alley - considering the theme of the project is environmentalism, which, come to think of it, seems to be my theme this summer as well. The freelance project that I'm still slaving away at is about environmentalism, as well as the First Hand project for Smiley Guy...

Although this strikes me as funny, I also think that it is pretty important. I don't think that there is enough awareness and worry about the affect that pollution creates on this planet. I've been reading and watching stuff about recycling lately, and there are so many things I've learned just from a little bit of research. But comparing the amount of views on YouTube about a recycling factory compared to the amount of views of a music video, even one made by an amateur, you can tell that people don't really care. How would the earth change if everyone just stood up and worked together, regardless of profit, regardless of how much hard work it is, and actually tried to save the earth by doing something? When I think of natural disasters that make humans come together to help one another, I can't help but think that if people could do that for the Earth, because that too is a natural disaster just waiting to happen, we could make a difference.

Alas, no one does anything, because procrastination is the key to our existence. We won't believe anything we can't see, and sometimes what we see we try to ignore in fear of upsetting the status quo.
It's funny how we can turn such a beautiful world into such a dirty one...

Just talking about environmentalism tires me out. I always start getting so frustrated, and then start ranting about it... Anyway, this week was simply the tip of the iceberg in terms of my interactive stuff. I'm definitely looking forward to next week~
-Anna

Anna Love Soccer

So it's week five into this summer internship, and everything has been going great. I've learned quite a lot, and everyone has been extremely welcoming and helpful.

I've been working on backgrounds for this small project called "First Hand" this week. It's a piece on the perspective of an Inuit group who feel the effects of the pollution of the environment much faster than people like us who live in the more central parts of the world. I really like the message that this film is conveying, since protecting the environment is something that I truly want to accomplish. Although this probably will not shake the world up with its profound meaning, I think it's a little step of the way towards achieving a worldwide awareness of environmentalism.

Other than that, this week has been all about the World Cup. Woohoo! I'm not an extreme sports fan, but honestly, soccer is my favourite sport. And although I am not glued to the screen whenever it is on, it has been pretty exciting to watch all the players run around in the field chasing that itty bitty soccer ball. And that wasn't sarcasm. Throughout this week, I've been constantly asking people whether or not they watch or have watched the World Cup, and which team they are cheering for. I personally don't have a favourite team - I just love soccer. But it's all fun and games.

So yeah, another week has flown by, and summer will end really soon, and I will have accomplished nothing in my own free time this summer again... Talk about depressing... It's nice that I have this internship, or else my entire summer will have gone to waste again...

Here's a link to a commercial that is really awesome, and I wish I had a part in, regardless of my skills in 3D.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTzMgkwtfiI

Welp, til next week~
Anna

Carol Embraces the Mask

Hey everyone, this week I had a bit of an epiphany. After Rich demonstrated how he animates Teleporting Fat Guy in front of me, suddenly something clicked in my head and I began to understand the meaning behind all the perfectly aligned keyframes. Instead of dragging on one movement by having many uneccessary keyframes, he made literally just 2 poses and did one inbetween for them and it looked so much more polished than all the extra things I have been trying to do. After the big movements you just need 2 frames or so to settle the movement. After watching Rich animate, I learn to be more organized and started to really understand how to animate in groups of frames.







 
Today I learned about using mask to show certain part of the animation that I want the audience to see and hide the parts I don't want them to see. Also played around with the graph editor while animating a bird and a run cycle to adjust the timing of the overall animation rather than just the begining or the end. Overall, I can say I've become a lot better and faster at animating. My goal is to hit 10 second a day, which I'm almost there.

Below is an example of a raven taking off, I've decide to give this raven a fast start by having a deep slop going upwards and finishing off with a more balanced speed.

Below is the mask I use for the girl running across the ground. She had to start by being inside the house so I put the mask there to cover certain areas of her body.

Carol Animates

Hey guys,
It's our intern's one month anniversary at Smiley Guys!

This week has been exciting for me. I received 3 big shots from teleporting fat guy to animate. For the first time, there not just 1-3 second long lol. In the scene I had 5 characters to animate; each acting out their own part, also including camera move and close-up. It was really fun being able to do different character performance for each of them.

What struck me for a bit was flipping the characters on flash. Since they're flat characters with no dimensions, the only way to turn their body was to cheat. At first I just flipped them horizontally to see how that goes, and of course it looked very stiff and boring. So I tried playing around by moving them towards the opposite side to give it some anticipation but it still didn't look right. Eventually
I asked Joel for help and he roughly put the character in place and explained to me the subtle things that makes a huge difference in the movement. Turns out it was all in the legs and many other small movements like the head. After his demonstration I was able to animate the next character turning much better. There are just so many things in flash I learned that made animating so much more fun and interesting.

One thing in particular I recently started doing was selecting the parts I'm trying to move rather than clicking one part at a time. It helped me save so much time and effort trying to move a character. Even animating the dad jar gave me the opportunity to ask Rich to show me by moving the lid (mouth) layer into the body layer I can move the whole thing without affecting individual parts. 
Every time I animate, I get to face new challenges and find new solutions which helps me become a more observant and productive animator over-time.

Inna and Her Mandala's

This week I came up with floral design for Caribou Mandala for our First Hand series based on original Gwich'in design patterns. I got Alex's approval and started the “bead-work” on it.

Photoshop beadwork is fun and feels almost like real embroidery process but is a bit faster of course:) It took me three days but the result was worth it and it looks cool in the end. I did six design variations and Alex and another producer Karen liked them all yay!

 If you have a look at the design you will see that red “lily-hooves” form a cross. This symbol is widely spread all over the world and as we see it is used not only by Catholics/Christians but by Native Indian tribes as well. 

 

For first Nations cross symbolizes Four Great Primary Forces and their interaction with the sun; Medicine wheel; Nature elements -Air, Fire, Water and Earth; the four directions, and the four seasons.

 

Here’s some more information on Native American cross symbol: http://www.warpaths2peacepipes.com/native-american-symbols/cross-symbol.htm

And here’s interesting book that I am using a lot as a reference for First Hand and for my 4th year film called The Sacred Tree. It was created by a Native American inter-tribal group of the Four Worlds International Institute that is located in BC, Canada.

It helps me to understand the meaning behind Native American symbols and gives a glimpse on Spirituality of indigenous peoples : http://books.google.ca/books?id=yNGrqIaaYvgC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

When I finished my beadwork on the Caribou Mandala Alex sent the file to Norma who did the voiceover for the film and who is actually is a real person and “Norma’s story” is Norma Kassi’s real story! That’s so amazing! I feel so proud of the project and lucky to have a chance to work on it. 

 

While working on Caribou mandala I felt the rising responsibility over my design, because for Gwich'in people Porcupine Caribou and anything related to them is sacred.

Here’s an interesting article on caribou that claims that all of Santa’s reindeer are probably cows :) because Porcupine Caribou are the only cervidae (deer species) in which both the male (bull) and female (cow) grow antlers, though the bulls possess much larger, even massive, antlers than females. Cows shed their antlers later in the season than bulls, in theory so they still have them for protecting calves. Only cows still have antlers as late as December. haha cool to know :)

http://thewhiskerchronicles.com/2013/12/19/the-sacred-place-where-life-begins/