I'm finished with everything! Finally!

The mouths weren't as difficult to do as I imagined- though, I'm still positive that trying to actually lipsync would have taken far longer. I'm happy with the result, though. It's a good stand-in for this draft... but before I submit to festivals, I'd like to actually do lips.

I finished the final scene- which, despite being simple in idea, was a lot more complex to animated because the file is HUGE. Basically, it's a giant road that Staticat rides Jerry down, surrounded by lightposts that turn off as they pass. After Effects really did not want to render it out or even let me animate- it was constantly whining about how large the file was. But, I beat it into submission. It takes three hours to render out. It's only fifteen seconds, when usually things that are a minute long take an hour. Crazy scene.

I drew all the electricity, finally. Don't know why I had put it off for so long. I think it looks pretty cool.

I got the music from my guy! It's really magical. I was a little frustrated because I asked him to do another fifteen seconds of filler music and to get it to me by Saturday at the latest, which he agreed to. ...Aaand then he never got it to me. Eh, I worked something out. though.

The soundscape is a little more... lackluster than I hoped. This was my fault for not giving myself the time or the means to foley everything, so I just had to find royalty free sound effects on the internet. Apparently high-quality sound of horse hooves is impossible to do. Guh. The soundscape works for this draft, but I definitely want to foley everything on my own before I submit to festivals as well as re-record the dialogue with better sound equipment. You'd think the sound booth would be good for recording sound... but it was terrible and made everything clunky and echoey, but I didn't have enough time to rerecord everything.

When I upped everything to a bigger aspect ratio, some things weren't drawn large enough (most of Jerry, for example). So, a lot of my time was spent redrawing Jerry and then reanimating things because the larger files didn't transfer over perfectly. Time-consuming, but I think it was worth it.

I did the credits and I really like how they turned out!

-Jordan

Almost There!

So clooose!

ANIMATION
Okay, so I'm finished with all the content (except for the electricity). I've finished animating all the scenes except for the last ten-twenty seconds, which I'll finish tomorrow. I upgraded everything to 1440x960, so it's nice and big now. The only problem with that is that some scenes, I drew the content with the smaller aspect ratio in mind and didn't draw them as large as others. So, right now I'm going through the process of finding things that look especially blurry and tracing them over on a larger scale. Hopefully I won't have to reanimate too much by doing this.

Finally (finally) decided on what I'm doing for mouths. For this final school screening, at least, I'm just going to be doing closed mouths. The characters will smile, frown, ect. as the dialogue demands rather than try doing lipsyncing, since that would probably take... weeks. If I had been a bit more organized and on top of things maybe I could have gotten it done for this semester, but eh. I already finished scene 1! And most of the characters are pretty easy. Jetpack Dan is almost constantly smiling, Jerry is almost constantly looking a little bored, and Biscuit... is a cat. Staticat is the only one whose mouth will be all over the place.

RENDERING
Rendering might be literally the worst thing in the world- and the worst thing about it is that I've been using my crappy laptop to do it when I should have been using the school's computers all along. Take this last week for example: I was going to render out the 5ish minutes of animation I had so I could show it in class. So, knowing that last time it said it would take six hours, I gave it a solid ten hours to render. I set it least quality to do so and went to bed. I wake up in the morning... eight hours had passed and it rendered THIRTY SECONDS. The worst, right?
  
So, I panicked and ran to the editing lab. There was two hours before class and I hoped by rendering different scenes on multiple computers, maybe I could at least get a minute of new footage to show. I set it up and it says "Oh, sure. Yeah, I can render that entire thing in an hour." So, further proof that I really, really need to get a new computer.

To test how long it might take to render the final product and how much time I should allot, I set the first scene (one of the most complicated because of the puppet-tool'd alien and large crowd scene) to render on best quality, animation compression. It said it would take two hours when, on my laptop, I'm sure it would try to say it would take like, twenty-four or something. So, I need to set aside a solid three days to render as a safety net. Basically I'm going to picture lock each scene as soon as possible and immediately set them to render out while I'm working on other stuff. Yay, multitasking!

Goal: Have everything finished and rendered by Sunday night. Then I'll have Monday and Tuesday to finalize the sound and Wednesday to render it out on Finalcut (which is sooo much easier than AE rendering, ugh). Then I'll have Thursday as a safety-net day to fix up anything I might have missed!

SOUND
I already have a lot of the sound effects gathered, now I just need to line 'em up and make my soundscape magical. Lots of hoof noises, lots of electricity, lots of cat sounds. As I said before I've finally gotten all of the dialogue and... really, I'm very disappointed about the sound the sound booth gave. It ended up sounding worse than the sound I just recorded in my room, ugh. I'll run some filters on them and hopefully I can make it not sound too bad, and the sound effects might help.

I talked to my guy about doing music and he agreed! In homage to the crappy video I made in 2004 that was the basis of Staticat's character, I'm using the song that I wrote for that video- but a sped-up rock version that will play during the opening and closing credits. I gave him the chords, the song and the lyrics (if he wants to use them) and he's going to record it this weekend and have it to me by Monday. He was really excited about it, which makes me really excited! Hooray!

OTHER STUFF
I made my Withoutabox website and started filling things out- it's a lot, blah. I'll get that done while things are rendering this weekend, yay. I also started making the poster- I'm doing a few designs, but one that I like is that I'm taking one of the posters I drew for background scenery (I think we only ever get to see half of it and only for a scene or two). It's sort of a classic war propaganda poster, but with Jetpack Dan saluting the American flag. I'm going to add Staticat (on Jerry's shoulders) spray painting her name (and, consequently, the name of the film) over Jetpack Dan's face. I think it'll be a nice, eye-catching and intriguing poster.

That's it! Hooraaaay!

Chuggin' Along

We're hitting the home stretch! I've completed all the elements (including the new ending) and have animated all the scenes (except for some parts of the new ending). I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from the class despite not being able to show some completely rendered sections that are more than a minute long... thanks to rendering issues. Note to self: Rendering WILL take MORE than eight hours. Ah, the life of an animator. Only thing left to do other than those ending bits are some smaller 'effect' things like crackling electricity and dust bits.

Mouths... blah. I still haven't really figured out what I'm doing there. I've had the mouths drawn for a while, but figuring out how to synch them to the animation without it taking weeks is a little daunting. I might end up just doing mouth expressions that match their emotions rather than lips that move up and down with every syllable without it looking bad. That's going to be fiddled with when I start working more with sound.

Speaking of sound, I've been gathering the sound effects and soon I'll start designing the soundscape! I just need to finish all the animation completely, which I expect to do this weekend. I'll then move on to the soundscape on Monday and Tuesday, and spend all of Wednesday rendering so I'll be ready for presenting on Thursday! So, stay tuned for that!

Andre suggested that I bump the aspect ratio up to 1440x960, since I had been working in a standard definition one. ...Which I'm not really sure WHY I was doing that- I think someone wanted that for a previous project I was doing so I was like "Yeah I'll do that for this, too!" and ... well, anyway, I'm going through and making everything bigger. It's not a lot more work- I have to redo most of the camera angles in After Effects but other than that, it's just changing the size of the backgrounds and since I drew everything very large, it doesn't take away any quality.

I'm going to design the poster soon, which will be fun. Yay!

-Jordan

Stiiill Working

Still just chuggin' along on animation. I've completely finished the first scene (JD fights the alien and talks to the reporter), the second scene (Introduction and conversation between Staticat, Jerry and Biscuit), the third scene (Jerry and Staticat attempt to rob a bank), the fourth scene (Jerry/Staticat conversation) and the sixth scene (final Jerry/Staticat conversation). That's about three or four minutes of total animation done!

I've just got three big scenes to finish- I've drawn all the elements of the fifth scene and just need to animate it, which I'm hoping to get done on Sunday.

Theeeen, I've got the new finale that I've written. I've started drawing up the new content for it, but still need to draw some of the characters and finish up the backgrounds. I haven't recorded sound for the new ending yet as well because my actors haven't been available, but I've arranged to record it this Monday, so I'll have that in the can! I'm a lot happier with this new ending than I was with the old one. And, what's better is that it's a lot less complex than the other ending (I'm going to miss the mountain of cats, but that means there's a jillion less cats to draw).

Next week I'll work on putting the mouths into the story, which I forsee as being really tedious. Depending on how long it takes me to draw and animate the new ending, I'll see if I can start designing the soundscape and maybe I'll have it ready by the time I present!

I also need to touch base with the band I talked to last semester and see if they'll have any time to record some music for me within the next couple of weeks. This animation doesn't necessarily NEED a lot of music, but I'd love to at least have some original music for the opening and closing credits and maybe a couple of stings for ~dramatic effect.

...Speaking of the credits, I hadn't even thought about that. I've been too concerned with doing the animation part. I might see if I can squeeze something out that's more than just boring white-on-black text, but that's also something I can jazz up later.

-Jordan

WHOOO

So, I've been forgetting to blog... mostly because I've just been constantly working on this animation! Auughh.

The Wiggler Tool has been a LIFESAVER. It's definitely saved me HOURS of tedious head-moving.

I decided over Spring Break to change the ending a little. I had been unhappy with it for a long time and finally decided that it wasn't worth me animating an ending that I knew I didn't like just for the sake of getting it done. So, I need to rerecord a bit of the dialogue still and need to animate another two minutes or so, but I really think that it's going to ultimately make the project... and ME... a lot  happier.

I decided that I'm doing a more anime-style for the mouths. Minimal movement.

I've finished all the content (save some elements of the new ending) and laid it all out in approximate chunks on the timeline and begun animating. There's still some fine-tuning that I could do, but the basics of the story are all there!

Sound design is going to be a bitch. I've started gathering together sound effects, but I need to start creating the soundscape.

Week 4

 SLOW AND STEADY
 Still just pluggin' away on the animation- there's still a bit of drawing that needs to be done that I didn't take into account. Little things like hand movements, things that a little more frame-by-frame than motion path. I'm going to try and get a lot of work done this weekend so that I can have at least a couple of minutes of rough animation down, and then later I can go through and start cleaning things up a bit.

I might have to rerecord some of the dialogue- line delivery that seemed right at the time doesn't flow quite perfectly with the animation, but now that I'm actually animating and know exactly where the characters are going to be and what their motivations are, I can give the actors a bit more specific direction.

Foley is a challenge that I'll have to tackle at some point- maybe in a week or two. It doesn't have to be anything too extensive, just enough to give the soundscape a bit of life. I'd love to get some original music recorded, too. I've got a band in mind and I'm sure they wouldn't mind just doing a couple stings and simple themes. I talked to the lead singer last semester about it and he said yes then, so I'll have to bring it up again!

-Jordan

Staticat, Week 1-3

 MISGIVINGS
Over the fall I was having some real issues with my production of Staticat- more emotional than hardware. I wasn't inspired by it anymore and had no drive to work on it. It was no longer something I felt deemed two semesters worth of work. I hated it.

While I didn't get a chance to work on as much over Christmas break as I wanted to, I did start redesigning things about the project that bothered me in an effort to get me to like the project again. And it worked! I did some new character design, started tweaking the script a bit to better fit the feel, and having the actors reading the lines helped me feel better about the project. 

Another issue I was having was animating in Flash, a program I have literally no experience with and was trying to figure out on my own. It was dragging me down spending all my time trying to figure out the program rather than doing any animating, so on the first week of FST 497 I asked if I could switch over to After Effects, a program I'm much more comfortable with. After Effects might limit the amount of motion I was picturing for the final project, but at least by using it I can actually get stuff done instead of just spending the entire semester trying to learn an entirely new program. Once I finally started working on it and animating it in After Effects, I felt a lot better about it.

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PRODUCTION

Production-wise, I've finished colored most of the backgrounds. I might go in later when I have time and add even more details than I do now- I'd like them to be as rich and interesting as possible to make up for the lack of complex motion that's going to go on with the characters, since After Effects somewhat limits the range of movement for 2D characters. I think I can get away with it without it looking cheap or lazy and having rich character designs and backgrounds should make up for that.

Started animating and forgot just how long it takes to really do anything, but it's okay. It'll be a lot of work, but I think the payoff will be good. 

I need to figure out how to do realistic mouth movements. Earlier I had tried just drawing a series of seven mouth movements and flipping back and forth between them, but it doesn't look very fluid or human. I might see if I can just animated a set of mouths forming letters and then strings those together into more fluid sentences so that it looks like the mouth is actually moving rather than just choppily flapping around. Since the face is going to be doing most of the movement with these characters, it needs to look good.

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ROUGH CUT

I showed about the first 15 seconds of animation in class today and got a pretty positive response! It looks like the new designs have paid off, though I need to put a bit more thought into the background characters. They looked a little too non-human, but the class agreed with me on the fact that they should still be simplified. They really liked the alien, which is good- he was pretty much a test on how many elements I can layer together to create a cohesive character that has a lot of points of movement. I'll try and apply what I used on him to my other characters.

-Jordan