Final Task Part 4

This is my final product of my self portrait, in terms of craftsmanship and how well I think I did I would have to say I did pretty well. Hours upon hours were spent keeping different layers in order, adjusting the opacity to make sure that the over lay was still noticeable but not over powering, and making sure that my lines were clean. Patience is definitely a skill that needs to be learnt went doing a project like this.
I feel that this does represent me and the things I like quite clearly, and that if someone were to look at this they would get a pretty fair understanding of who I am as a person.
I definitely learnt some new skills and techniques when it come to colouring, like for intents when I drew Bowie I learnt that using a combination of different colours (such as burgundy and orange), not just different shades of pink, can really help in making skin look more realist. The main piece of advice I would give some one is to have patience, and to not be afraid to experiment.

Final Task Part 3

To start here are some screen shots of my drawing process while making my project:

While making this I would still say that the hardest part was figuring out what to put on my silhouette. Once I put down some of my favorite bands and books down then the hardest thing drawing wise was the picture of David Bowie, which took me quite a lot of time and effort.    

Final Task Part 2

Thinking up a concept for this final task is very quickly proving to be the hardest part. I never really was one for expressing myself and because of that I really didn't know what part of my self to focus on for this assignment. After giving it some thought I came to the conclusion that the things that I like are what help shape and are untimely a part of me. So what my self portrait will be is a collage of things that interest me in the shape of my silhouette.
I will be using my drawing program ArtRage Studio to draw it, because it is easily accessible to me and I have quite a lot of experience using it. I also feel like it will be the best tool to make my self portrait with.
I knew that I wanted to feature some of the bands I enjoy and my love for landscape photos so I started off by putting those into my silhouette, I also purposely made my silhouette not actually look like me, but how I would prefer to look. I an not sure how I want the background to look or if I even want to have a background or just leave it transparent. I do however plan on adding a lot more to my picture so that it will be completely filled up when I finish it.

Final Task Part 1

By far I would have to say that making my own stop motion animation was the hardest task I had to complete in this course, and because of that it is also the work I am most proud of. When making my stop motion I didn't have access to any actual animation software, instead, I had to use a regular drawing program and draw out by hand each frame on an different layer. With having over 150 frames and therefor having over 150 layers, it made my computer slow and start to leg whenever I went to work on it. I also had to go back and add in more frames to my animation, and having the old frames match up with the new was a much harder task then I anticipated, and even though it may not look as smooth as I would like I am still happy that I managed to complete it on time. All of the difficulties I faced and over came while making my animation is the reason why it is the project I am most proud of. I feel that I have learned quite a lot more about animating things out of this experience, and comparing it to an animation that I have made last year proves to me that I have indeed improved quite a lot (unfortunately the animation that I am refereeing to is on my old laptop that is broken and cant turn on, if I still had a copy of it I would show you). If it wasn't for the deadline that was closing in I would have had more time to go over and improve the choppiness of the old and new frames blending together, so that would have defiantly been something that I would have improved if given the chance. Something I would change would be the length of the animation, originally I wanted the "blob" to form into more things before turning into the phoenix at the end, but once again I didn't have time to do that.

The Finished Product of my Stop Motion Animation

152 frames later an I have finally completed my stop motion. Overall I would say that I had a good experience doing this even though it did prove to be challenging at times. Since I can't decide whether or not to post my animation as a video or a GIF I will post it as both, once again I am using gifmaker to make my GIF and video. Enjoy. 

Making my own Stop Motion Animation part 2

Now that I am nearly done with my animation I have ran into a few more difficulties that I feel should be shared. The first one being me having to go back and add in more frames to my animation. Now that may not seem like much work until you note that I named each frame I made as a number, meaning that when I went back to add more frames I had to change the name of all the frames after it. The scene that I wanted to change was the one shown below.

 After seeing it I decided that I wanted to show the shark fins swimming for a bit longer before I had them morph into something else, and after going back and adding more frames I got it to last as long as I wanted it to. After that I had to make sure that the new frames I drew matched up with the old ones; which proved to be a challenge but once I got it to look okay I was fairly happy with it. 

I am not yet done my animation but I am almost there, so you can expect to see it later on today.

 

Making my own stop motion animation

There are many different mediums one could take when it comes to making a stop motion; you can draw it out by hand on a flip book, use legos and create a scene, or use clay to morph shapes. Originally I wanted to make my stop motion using clay, but since I don't have any clay to use I figured that I can simply draw out what it was I wanted to do and make it that way. That's why for this project I am using my drawing tablet to draw out frame by frame my animation. I am using an app called ArtRage to draw my animation with, since I know that time will be a bit of an issue I'm not going to make it overly complicated; instead, I'm gonna use this as a learning opportunity so that I can find out what works well and what doesn't for future events.
What I have planed so far isn't much, I'll admit that, but I have a basic idea of what I want to do. I want to show a ball bounce into frame an over the course of the video morph into different shapes, as can be seen below in my quick story board I made.

       Obviously I plan to do more then just that but for now that is what I have.
While working I made each frame and story board it's own layer; which is a bit difficult to do being that the layers quickly add up and the more layers I have the more my computer slows down, not to mention that it can get hard and time consuming to keep track of all my layers. Something that I like to do to see how smooth my animation looks is by making it into a gif, its a rather quick and simple progress that I find works for me; here's a gif of what I have done so far:

As you can see I still have a lot to do in order to finish this in time, so wish me luck and I will go on back to work.

Making a GIF

The above video shows how two people go about making gifs and how they do it. Gifs are becoming more and more popular online and are often used to convey how someone is reacting to something, those are usually referred to as reaction gifs. An example of a reaction gif that I found on giphy.com is this:

When making my own gif I wanted to show the progress I went thourgh while painting an picture for my art class. Originally I wanted to finish my painting before I made it into a gif, but unfortunately, I'm running out of time to complete this project. To make my gif I went to gifmaker.me and uploaded all the pictures I had (clicking and dragging the mouse over multiple picture is a good way to save time). 

Once all the picture where in I then adjusted the speed setting one the right of the page. It was originally at 500 milliseconds and I wanted it to be a bit slower, so I changed it to 700 milliseconds. 

Since I felt that nothing else really needed changing I then simply clicked "Create GIF Animation" and once it was done loading selected "Download the GIF".

The finish gif that I got is seen below; overall the process was straight forward and easy to use, so much so that I even bookmarked the website so that I can easily go back to it whenever I find myself needing it again. 

Animating Styles

In the above video it shows Marty Cooper and his unique style of animation, which is drawing characters on an transparent piece of paper and having it interact with the world around it. This is clearly an interesting way to animate, and even though the idea to mix drawings in with the real world isn't exactly new, it is still is an fresh way to do it. An animator that I use to follow a few years ago named EmptyFeet on YouTube does a more common type of animation. They don't do the traditional type of stop motion where one would take pictures of clay models, instead they draw out each frame and compose the images though the computer to make their animation. The video below is the first animation of theirs that I seen, and even though it is a few years old by now I still think that it is a good representation of what it is they do.