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