Quick Update from Carol

Hey guys,
This is almost my final week here. It has been an amazing experience being able to work with Smiley Guys people. Thank you for the pizza and beer, it was awesome!

Aside from that, I colored Uberdude backgrounds and other characters most of the week and designed an airplane and a pilot for defying gravity. After that, I incorporated what I learned from Chirp's fan animation and use the same technique for the propeller on the plane.  

Goodbye from Anna

Hey guys. I'm sad to say this, but today is my last day at Smiley Guy... It was a lot of fun, and I genuinely learned a lot from everyone. I would totally recommend it to anyone wanting an internship at an animation studio. Not only are the people there friendly and helpful, they are all very talented in their field.

Throughout these eleven weeks, I've accumulated a wide variety of experience in flash. Not only did I animate using symbols - which I've never really done - I created the symbols that I used to animate, and created props and backgrounds as well.

In the beginning, I was pretty nervous, since the meager experience I had in Flash was all traditional animation. But as I worked on Teleporting Fat Guy, I started to get the hang of it. Now, when I look back, I can actually see the improvement, from the flow of the animation to the speed in which I animate. After working on Teleporting Fat Guy, we helped out with First Hand, which was something that hit us all emotionally at one point or another. Environmentalism is something I've always had an interest in, so I really wanted to work on First hand, and I can probably say the same thing for the rest of the interns, too. This was when I drew backgrounds based off the animatic, in a style I've never really done much. First hand was a great experience, because it was back to the basics, but at the same time, something totally new.

After a week or two in First Hand, we worked on Uberdude. I was colouring animations, and that needed to be done fast. That improved my speed as well as my skills in Flash, because I have honestly never coloured so much in my life. Haha. Later, Teleporting Fat Guy needed help, and so we helped. I was just doing various things at various times, and it was totally normal at the studio.

Lastly, Interactive. Another environmentalism project, but with a spin. It wasn't a film, but a game. Since games are somewhat an interest of mine (Hah, who am I kidding? I love games), I jumped at the opportunity to work on it. And in the end, I loved every bit. The hard parts, the not so hard parts, the fun and the tedious things that I had to do. Having an internship at Smiley Guy was one of my best spent summers of my life. Meeting new people, who were all so friendly, and working on things that were just so interesting really made this summer worthwhile.

I guess I'll leave it on this note. And well, I've pretty much written all that I've wanted to. Thanks to everyone who've read this, for even giving a little bit of your time to browse through my ramblings. So yeah.
Over and out~
Anna

Anna Draws Some Garbage

This is week 10 of my internship. How fun and fulfilling my summer has become because of it. Although the transit from Markham to Toronto has been a bit of a hassle, it was quite fun - observing people who were either going to work or leaving it, and actually being part of that crowd, with the same purpose. 

This week, I have been working on my animation skills, using the characters that I created. It really made me appreciate the people who designed the Teleporting Fat Guy characters. It took a while for me to get the hang of making the character, placing everything in its proper order and getting them to look right. But not only did the character designers from Teleporting Fat Guy do that, they created them with the animators in mind. Every little bit of change was anticipated, and every little bit had a corresponding symbol to it. Although I had created mine with that in mind, I didn't put as much detail into it, and so when I was animating, I ran into obstacles. None that I couldn't jump over, but it would have made it a lot smoother had it been done with more detail in the first place. Let me just say that I have a lot of appreciation for people who create symbol characters now. Not that I didn't have any before... But now I have the knowledge to back up that claim. 

But that's not all I've done. I've also finished with the garbage that the game needed. Yes, I was drawing garbage for the first half of the week. And everyone complimented me on it. I do need to show you, because I'm quite proud of it myself.

Let me describe the process. I first had no idea what to draw for the garbage, so I researched a bit, and it didn't really tell me a thing. All it showed me were generic garbage, and I had that image in my head already anyway. So I looked around the studio (all I did was turn my head around), looking for possible trash ideas. I classified things into recyclables and trash, and made a list of what could be what. Then I drew a rough version in photoshop and imported it into Flash. And from there, I used the pencil tool and traced over my rough drawings, converted them into symbols and coloured them. I didn't really have a colour scheme in mind, but I wanted the recyclables to stand out, so I used brighter colours for those, and duller colours for the garbage. I also tried to keep in mind that the props needed to fit in with the background and the characters. So I simplified that even more and deleted the inner outlines of the objects. The result is what you see above. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied...

Anna Cleans Up

Blog - Week 09

Hi guys. It's me again. Boy, time passes by so quickly - I can't believe it's already week 9 of this summer's internship. I guess what they say is true. Time passes quickly when you're having fun.

I've been continuing my interactive this week, working on finishing the background for the game. Deadlines are coming up, so I've got to work harder and faster.

This week, I've been animating conveyor belts for the background. These conveyor belts will bring the garbage to the player so that they can hand it over to 'volunteers'. It probably doesn't make any sense at this moment, especially not when I've described it this way. You can tell I'm not that good at explaining things, haha.

Figuring out the background was tricky, because there were so many elements to consider. The volunteers going in and out, where the garbage would end up, and where the recycling would also end up gave us such an obstacle. However, after juggling around several ideas, I'm happy to say that we figured out what to draw, and hopefully, people will like it.

Over and out, see ya next week~

Anna Grows in Interactive

Blog - Week 8

Hello people~
How was your Canada Day? What did I do that day? I watched fireworks at my local park and miraculously did not get bitten by any mosquitoes. Since I am like a bait for mosquitoes, I'm considering that to be quite a feat. Other than that, I've been rereading  The Name of the Wind. It's such a great book. I simply cannot wait for the third book to come out.

This week, I've been continuing to work on my interactive stuff, trying to polish it. My concept art for the characters was lineless, but when I was creating the symbols, I used lines. Today, I decided to stick with the lineless look because it made everything sleeker. By doing so, the characters stand out on the screen even more.

Several technical bits that I didn't know about or was confuzzled by was taught by Joel. He really clarified things up with smoothing out the shapes and other small but really important bits. I mean, you wouldn't think that there was a command for pasting in place, and so I spent so long just trying to shift a circle back into that same position in the previous keyframe... There were numerous shortcuts and stuff that Joel taught me that just simplified the process and simplified my life too.

Other than that, when interactive overwhelms me, I shift back to working on First Hand. At the moment, I am flashifying some props to animate them. I'm working on this scene in a greenhouse, where stalks of tall grass start sprouting up from the ground. Since I haven't really finished it yet, I made a small gif to illustrate what I want the result to look like.... Kinda... Beware. I made this gif in 10 minutes... Quality isn't... well, let's just say it isn't my best work.

 And here's a pic of what the greenhouse actually looks like. Just not animated.

Anyhow, that's it this week. Ciao
- Anna

Anna Moves to Interactive

Hey guys! What's up? This week, yes, what I have been waiting for - INTERACTIVE STUFF! Ta da~ I feel like waving my hands in the air or something.

So anyway, this week, I've been concentrating on an interactive game like I said last week, and it has been pretty fun. Everything is new to me, and majorly daunting and majorly cool. I started on the concept side, giving an image to the idea that was emailed to me. I drew some characters for the game, and a background as well, on photoshop. After that, I imported it into Flash and cleaned it up. This part is really awesome, because I'm actually making the symbols for the character animation. How cool is that?

I've done some Teleporting Fat Guy animation before, so I understand how crucial a good and well done symbol can be. If the pivot point is in the right place, it makes everything smooth sailing. Otherwise, watch out for that tsunami!

I got a great tutorial from a co-worker (thanks Darien!) and I am learning a lot. I've had to backtrack a bit, since my concept doesn't exactly work with what the symbol making needs it to be, so I'm currently drawing a better character design.  But all that drawing will just make me a better artist~

So yeah, this week it really has been overwhelming, with all the new things I'm absorbing. I'm also still working on my freelance stuff as well as helping a friend with some illustration projects she's stuck on. With internship, transit and just life in general, I don't have a lot of free time. It makes me sad when I see my brother, who just finished graduating from high school yesterday, be so carefree that he can sleep until 3 in the afternoon. No, you know what, it makes me mad. It's not healthy to sleep so much.

Sleep? What's sleep?

Well, until next time.

Oh, and here's two cool Molson commercials for the upcoming Canada day~!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t41wNkGvJ9k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gper3YkzMg

(Why am I promoting Molson's beer? I don't even drink alcohol... OTL)