week 9 Closing statements

well well wellity well! after a billion years and the death of a thousand suns our project is nearing completion, some minor editing and brushing up is under way and currently remains the only phase left in our project. it’s certainly been an experience. Although i found the first semester a more pleasant experience, i feel i learned a lot more from this semester,  the practical side of using flash to create a full animation was virtually unknown to me, when this semester started i hadn’t used flash in months, this soon changed to every day, and bot did we get close. me and my ol buddy flash… cough.

Well i may as well tell you of the fun i had with the last scene; it featured gun shots, explosions guys jumping through windows a man on fire, and i shot a guy in the heart, with a gun. Although it was the hardest scene to animate i definitely enjoyed it the most, not in the least because of the flaming perp played by the excellent Mick Mahady, arguably his finest performance.

The main success of this scene is that after months and months i managed to find a “thunk sound” that didn’t suck! you’d be amazed how hard that is. Thank you SONY for respecting my right to use your merch for educational, non profit purposes. annnnyways, it was a new challenge for me to put together a scene with real action, as up to now adnan had handled the shootouts, whilst i did the dreaded non violent scenes.

LOOK OUT!!!

Adnan had actually created this scene more or less, and then a severe flash fail caused him to lose everything, his flash troubles were ten times what i had, and believe me i had, had a LOT.

I feel we’ve created our animation to the best of our abilities and i’m happy with the results, i know however that had there been less inexplicable problems with the software we would’ve gotten a lot more done, we would’ve finished sooner and been able to have a longer editing period. I’ve no doubt there’ll be suggestions for changes or alternate angles when we show our animation, but thats simply a case of opinion. I think we’ve done a good job here and i hope our audience feels like wise. And if they don’t well what ya gonna do?

have a blast a this:

.

throughout the animation i’ve learned of a few brand new techniques simply down to trial and error; to name a few:

• Save and compact feature
• Duplicate Symbol feature
• 3D tween tool
• Bone tool (way more definite knowledge of it)

i also learned how to more successfully manage:

1. motion tweens (you CAN adjust the size of them After creating the tween WITHOUT altering the position of the keyframes)
2. armatures (how to “manage” their buggy temperamental nature)
3. shape tween (totally re learned how to use them)

It is tragic that MOST of the knowledge i gained from this wasn’t based on animation but based on troubleshooting inane errors! As far as i can see Flash is  a travesty, its buggy untested and infuriating at its worst. BUT i’ve expressed enough choler ot that point  so i won’t bore you with it again.

GangWay

as for what remains to be done, we have to upload all the details and html for our website. we received confirmation of our host name from digiweb (a billion years l8r) so our website will be up and running, totally live soon enough. Tanya is seeing to that now, adnan is working on piecing the animations final draft together and what am i doing, what am i doing indeed! I’m writing my blog.. and such.

don't mess with the 5oh

Group Project Week 8: Really wish i was finished now

so i’m still on my last scene, sadly it appears to be taking ridiculously long for any kind of progress, but i am getting closer, bit by bit to completing this excercise in “flash fail” tolerance.  Now here’s just a little information i found out about our friend flash… be warned you may find it a little,, ALARMING:

flash Cs4 released in march 2008:

rejoice peons! ur savior is here

And as we can see here adobe have made steady profits and increased the value of their stock from despite their shameless bug ridden software:

throw more money on the fire, im catching a chill

but what of the hidden costs of adobes profits… things are about to  take a sinister turn!

Suicide RISES in 2008!!!

cant deny the statistics!

Not to mention MURDER:

a dark empire built on blood!

As once can plainly see the  relationship between flash cs4 and these statistics is far more than coincidence..its evidence!  in the murder trial of all those victims! not since 1998 when Internet Explorer 4 was releasedwas there such a surge inmayhem and death.

SOMETHING to think about, next time you say flash is awesome… murderer!

 anyway, back to the point at hand i’ve been stuck on and REGRETABLY off of the single remaining scene “Shootout 2″ for the best part of this week, i pray god i’m finished it by sunday, necause as it drains more and more of my time, my enthusiasm ashamedly and undeniably flees me. I love conceiveing cool angles, are planning out the mechanics of how a scene will look, be shot, flow or  sound. But actually doing it sucks! i know this because i cant pull off the exact effects i want with my limted background eith flash and animation in general, i can can conceive it but i cant portray it. like chef says i’ve got the heart, but i haven’t got the talent.

THus! i should pursue a career in mangaemnt, telling talented individuals what to do,  not only doing nothing, but basing my whole career around it.  ANYWAYS the scen itself involves a lot of subtle movements, which im fine with, its the glaringly obvious ones that seem to be causing the problem, like leg movements and other eye catching movements. Ive literally created 80% of the scene and scenery from scratch, sounds had to be re edited, scenery had to be designed, existing items had to be scaled, and every shot had to be thought out. I drew up a storyboard specifically for this scene. Truth is, in all my suffering under the disgustingly lax tutelage of flash i have learned so much about animation, and much about the peculiar and infuriating tempereamental nature of this BLASTED software. ITS not like photoshop! it doesnt just WORK, it decides NOT  the user, it goes on rants, it crashes it cries it moans, its so human it makes me weep.. WITH RAGE. I’ll cry when i m done killing!

I have actually by divising a list of everything that   is so, so very wrong, and weird with flash cs4. This isnt out of my obsessive nature, its due to the relentless and bewildering nature of  flash cs4′s user fail system.

 

The Todd. king of flash

HEY TODD PERKINS! how come when you use the bone tool, flash doesnt decide to AUTOMAGICALLY create another identical limb, in an apparently random position.  or simply make ur already created IK armature disappear! or maybe even leave it all itact, but move it a few pixels in some RANDOM DIRECTION.

as you may have guessed i feel that the flaws with Flash Cs4 have kept back my progress, and made it more difficult to work with, the unpredictable natire of certain tweens has led to several massive delays in scenes which should’ve taken nought but moments. 

Thus far i have succeeded in creating a few shots that lived up to my expectations and i believe worked well: have a goo:

 

nico doesnt know he's a star yet

 dun dun dun!

Keep the change, ya filthy animal

 But i’ll leave ya with this one, this one im particaularly pleased with, muhuhahahahaha:

don't do drugs

Group Project Week 7 two weeks to tragedy

Despite the undeniable gloominess of the title of this weeks entry everything is going well… relatively speaking.

I’ve managed to pull off some cool tricks using tools in flash i had never used before, like the awesome (pretend you’ve vision and depth perception) 3D Tool, it rocks! i used it in my car scenes to alter the angle of the cars handbrake accordingly.

Vroom

 I’ve also been using a mixture of bone tool and motion tweens, i discovered tat the bone tool is totally crap if you’re trying to get a character to walk vertically up or down on the screen, it just doesnt work, so i adopted an extremely david firth like use of motion tweens on characters legs in these scenes.

Now i know what ur thinking! that certainly doesnt run perfectly! well its one issue i’ve yet to adress! Flash swf files run perfectly, conversions are a little more.. unpredictable, this of course is a major nuisance, but is currently difficult to overcome, the most inane part of this whole problem is that the swf file works perfcetly, and as such one should simply be able to convert the swf. WRONG!!!! no simply about it ive tried every turd party piece of crap malware ridden piece of software that claims it can perform the miracle of swf to avi or swf to mp4, move even and not one of them! not a single one had the capacity to duplicate a swf accurately into another format, im not asking them to turn water into wine! or fish into bread!!!! although that’d be a fascinating, if completely useless power, yuck fish!

so… as i said that problem remains unchanged. Flash errors have been frequent but not devastating. merely ferociously annoying. like the bone tool has so many bugs an kinks too it, in the game design industry there is a travesty that often occurs and that travesty is premature release of unfinished untested software. this is my feeling towards flash Cs4, which shocks me, because its Cs4 professional, professional translates from L337  to “ you have to pay money to use me” So what adobe did, (like what game producers do at an alramingly increasing rate) was they slapped their name and franchise on a product completely unsuitable for release; threw in a few new shiny toys to detract from immediate disapproval of their users and made a cool million.

oh boy! cant wait to release cs5! double the price! half the features!

Being a complete bastard i can really empathise with screwing people over to make a quick buck, i can respect it even. HOWEVER!!!! i do not appreciate when that person is me! YAAAAAH!!!! take that capitalist pig!

AS regards my actual animating this week, i took time out of every day and finished  a few scenes little by little. THe tedium has payed off!   i have these scenes finished, they may ned polishing, but the animation end is finished:

1. office scene – added in adnans head
2. car    scene – added in details, fixed a motion tween
3. garden scene – did from scratch
4. office 2 scene – did from scratch
5. car 2 scene – did from scratch
6. grave scene – did from scratch

I definitly see the benefit of building up our image lirbrary at the start, although numerous occasion i had to creat new symbols or edit existing ones having them their and ready was a great help.

2moro i’m moving on to the “shootout scene 2″ as adnan is concentrating on shootout 1 and the dramatic scene. undoubtedly these are the most difficult scenes, but a t least a lot of stuff happens in them, and as such they should be exciting to animate. SADLY i feel like many of the dramatic close ups and camera angles will suffer a huge loss in impact because we can’t edit facial expressions, HOWEVER!!!! if one has time i believe i’ll swap some different emotive photos in for specific scenes, but i’d consider that part of th polishing process right now.

Group Project week 6

BOOM!!!!
animatrix! no wait, that makes no sense!

whose gonna drive u home.. tonight?

This week i got stuck into scene 2 of our animation, it was infinitely boring, i believe i lost thirty percent of my brain in the incident.

It’s a plot establishing scene, which involves the two main characters chatting about love, life and awesomeness. It’s quite short and was horrendously boring and meticulous to animate, i think this was largely due to flash being a stupid, crap head, girl pants. I’ve stayed up for at least 17 hours straight without stalling or “crashing” but not flash! i knew i was in for it when flash had an unforseen error (girl problems) and crashed on open.

The scene involves a parley between our two characters whilst they’re going for a drive out to their next assignment. the camera switches between one character and the other. OH!!! i should mention it starts with an establishing shot of the car from a distance which is then gradually zoomed in on. Bam! were back… the conversation bounces from one character to the other and the camera follows it intently, waiting for them to reveal their inner secrets. although an understandably necessary scene for the logical progress of the animation i abhorred doing it. It involved much nit picking and miniscule animation, no explosions, or moose or ninjas!

this scene really summed up the wussiness of flashes impotent abilities, muhuhuhahaha, what this scene need is some of this:

Get some nuts!

Anyways there isn’t much to say about the scene, some of the visuals were nice, i like the way the mouth movement turned out, the sound efx are pretty cool, and the car driving off bit is nice, i’ll have to get a rough preview up, i haven’t yet uploaded to youtube yet tho, soon it shall be complete, as it stands were practically two scenes down, were going in into the eliminatrix now which is a stupid word i just invented to make easter holidays sound more intimidating.

like this easter bunny here:

i'm not a bad guy, just had bad luck

I can sense the great fear and dread! of these upcoming holidays, that we will falter crash an burn, but if we really hammer out our animation every day of the easter break we should be fine. we’ve come to far now to fail! this won’t be like Nam!

next week ill be working on the next scene which will be the two characters getting out of the car conversing and walking towards the perps hideout. I have yet to update the sound fx on the script i’ll probably do that now, save everyone some hassle there. all other assignments in the short term are coming to a close this week, which is a definitely a weight off my shoulders, i’d say once i hit  a flow ill be able to animate at about twice the speed I’m currently animating, should have no distractions either just finished Dawn Of War Chaos Rising, which was good, but far too short.

good, but certainly room for improvement

so i’ve no distractions! and i’ll be animating scene with more obvious movement and action, Adnan will still be hammering away at the action packed life changing shootout scene, and tanya will be working on the website, and selling meth to kids.

Animation time!!!!! Week 5 of group Project

BAM!!!!! its finally her folks, the dreaded push come to shove! Animation time, all the hypothesizing, well-wishing, trash talkin, day dreaming is over and now we have to prove our abilityies or get blown out of the water! not literally of course, that’d be ridiculous! Well at the end of the first week of animaiton its like this, see: Me and Adnan split the animating between us while Tanya concentrates on the website, i took the first scene, nt the intro, which we still have to devise, but the actual first scene of the movie, we call the office scene.

 There were many interesting, completely outrageous system and software fails before things got any kind of flow to them. HOWEVER, maybe its just paddys day talkin, but i seem to have the hang of this now, i know what i want and waht angles to use and all that jazz, it just takes a bit of thinking about and a bit of luck to get the effect you want.

  This week  i feel i’ve done exactly what i set out to do and thats aweseom, problem is, this was an easy scen by comparison to others, Great way to start tho, i had a lot of trouble shooting, memory sizes were atotal bitch in all our flash documents, i believe it was a combination of oversized files, WAVS, MASSIVE JPEGS/PNGS and live traces which i didnt acutually know about. Ive use live traces lots befotre and if theres one thing they do well its completely RAPE your systems memory. Niamh showed us some excellent memory managing stategies, in particular the save and compact funciton in Flash, and the NEVER USE LIVE TRACES in animation approach.

 Stupid live traces! think they’re so awesome, you’d swera we were using handicapped computers or something, but were not! i digress! even the mac attacks aren’t to blame for this toxic fail! No   its defiinitely a flash fail; why even have live trace if flash handles even the most minor traces so badly, it gives the program instant irritable bowel syndrome. ANYWAYS!!!! with new knowledge aflame in our brains and old knowledge renewed we wer all set to begin animating. As soon as i got over my initial(still unexplained) errors of FLA files MAGICALLY CHANGING as soon as i saved them from one computer to another everything worked well.

My scene has a little bone tool, a lot of motion tweens, a few sound efx and for once lots of nested symbols, nested symbols are totally sweet! I was a pure flash tard before when i never used them, i also made use of proper naming structure  for layers, folders and symbols, which also made it much easier to navigate the document, My flash file worked as i wanted it to and all was good with the world.

Heres some examples of the scene:

Establishing scene

 THis is the indoors establishing scene, i combined every object in it into one symbol so i could slide the whole background in. I went into the symbol and nested a bone tool armature animation inside it, which can be seen  when brennans  typing on the keyboard, i also added a small animaiton into the window in the background to display raindall outdoors. The artwork used in this scen was made by al three of us, which gives it a cool unusual style.

Or a horrible mess of gank depending on your viewpoint, mine is natutrally the former.

Brennan in the office

This is just brennan in the office, i’m using a default head here because i don’t actually have the updated heads i need from adnan, However its just a case of swapping Symbols  to remedy this detail.

Brennans ugly mug reflection

 This is a close up of of Brennans ugly mug, this is a still from a Zooming motion tween, i like it cus its got nested symbols inside nested symbols, which i’d never tried before, i  didnt even know if you could, but you can! hurray for new stuff!

NOW LETS TRY THIS!!!

Group Project week 4 Sound Recording and editing 2 of 2

THis week for group projecy we had two goals, complete our sound recording, aqusition and editing  AND prepare our presentation.

The presentation was closer to the mark so we started work on that first, i began compiling the information for the power point presentation and putting ti in order, then i wrote in the details  and imported the media to the slides. It was a dull laborious process! but i understand why it has to be don’t, to highlight what it is we HAVE done.

Tanya designed the awesome cover page collage for our presentation, it rocks; tis pure mental lookin

Myself  Tanya and Adnan all got together to complete the presentation, and work on the animation for our promo.  we spent literally ten hours on the promo, there we many problems, mainly our png files seem to have the same effect on flash as napalm has an children. We literally had ten png images and they were casusing constant choppiness an massive lag, and of course crashes! Crashes!

on windows 7!

thats unheard of, god damn! i’d understand if we were dealing with macs here, but windows 7! the point is we definitely have a problem wirth our pngs for some reason our flash document is rejecting them like an aids filled heart transplant.

After an eternity of infinite horror and complete drudgery… it’s a word. The sound categorizing is all but complete, barring two sfx; the much needed, cartonnish “donk” impact, AND  the”fall down the stairs impact” are all that remain. as someone said a long time ago in a galaxy far away soon it shall be complete.

i find your lack of sfx disturbing

 with th presentaiton done and dusted we moved onto our next step which was planning how to animate, we came to the decision that Adnan and myself would animate whilst tanya developed our website, three heads are better than one!, unless all ur heads are ugly or have gingivitis and haletosis, lets be glad thats not the case!

We’ve decided to animate everything we can withouyt using heads on our characters until we solve the problem of the MASSIVE FLASH FAIL that seems to be occuring directly as a result of our png head images… there must be a way! yaaaaah! Anyways until thats resolved we’ll be animating headless detectives, shouldnt be any problem either considering our heads are static, even the mouth movements are symbols on top of the heads,  i suppose the important thing is we have all the building blocks for our  animation… NOWS THE REAL TEST!!!!

DUN DUN DUN!!!! i’d ad that sound in there if i had a magic upgrade account! but for now you’ll have to make do!

Week 3 Sound recording/editing 1 of 2

This week was the first of our sound recording and editing phase, and my was it fun! throughout the week we began recording our dialogue, finding and categorizing our specific sound effects, adding new lines of dialogue to the script and adding more imagery to the library.

Myself and Adnan recorded the dialogue using micorphones and sound recording software, it was fun i constantly fluffed lines. it struck me as far more difficult than i’d first imagined, becasue my voice is so plain or something, basically, i need to suck less ar these things the parts with big emotional displays were very hard. Of course now that we  have the basis of our dialogue recorded we can go back and re record where neccessary.

Adnan was quite solid he was voicing Zuckerberg whilst i was voicing “newly renamed”  Brennan, we thought it was funny considering our heads represent the opposite characters to our voices in the animation. we recorded the sound scene by scene, estimating and adding time in between lines where there was a lot of action but no dialogue. 

 We broke our recording into seperate sections within scenes, ensuring that timing of our dialogue would never be an issue. We recoded all our files in .WAV at about 44khz this willl ensure quality… although  it may be too large a files size, we shall see how it all works out. We then went about compiling and locating all our sound effects for the whole animation, Sweet Jesus! that was head melting and time consuming, some finds were impossible to locate that day SJHOTGUN BLAST!!!! wht noise does a shotgun make???

well it  certainly isnt this!

oh.. i see wordpress wont let me upload sound without a “space Upgrade” i was in nam! i dont need your god amn space upgrade! bunch a hippie scumbags! http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/weapons.html bAm! you like that wordpress!

the above link is the location of some of the other abysmally unsuitable sound effects which we will not be using in our animation. So i must look elsewhere for suitable effects, i have some old cd’s at home that may contain something of use. I comiled a list of all the sound we currently have, and currently need at the end our script .pdf.  coloured in red are the sound effects we have yet to get.

Over all im quite happy with our sound progress so far, picking up those last few straggle sounds m take some time, but im sure we’ll be able  to find them. Since we are laying down sound before animating its imperitsve for us to get all the neccessary sound efx as soon as possible.

Whilst myself and Adnan attending too the sound  Tanya was producing man more images for a our library. when we all got together on thursday we discussed what we’d do for the next weeks presentation and decided we’d animate one scen from the movie, we have all the neccessary sounds for the scene and most of the imagery, we’ll put it all together as soon as we can.

Character Development week 2

This week we focused on gathering all  our graphics for the animation together, amending our script and we put all our work together.

we decided the best way to create our imagery was to break it into sections, so we broke the different graphics up into categories; for example; i took bodies, weapons and efx. Tanya took furniture, outdoor scenery and props, whilst Adnan dealt with cars and buildings.

I designed the bodies based on the same template and tried to keep them as simple as possible. I used solid colours and easily recognizable features to accentuate the comedic value of our animation. because of the iterative design process we realized that character design had to be kept simple as possible. The characters arms and legs are stick like so that we can focus on the quality of their animation as opposed to the complexity of their visual appearance. (Heh, mouthful!)

Our characters bodies

for the weapons, i used the pen tool to trace images of real weaponry to achieve a recognisable and visually appealing result, i love the pen tool! it puts talent where there is none! muhuhuhahahaha, i had a childhood love of all things action, so it was awesome to get to do the weaponry, i purposefully picked weapons i thoughtwould be suitable for the scenario, except for the AK47 assault rifle, i just put that in because its the worlds favourite implement of death, i mean look! mozambique has it on their flag!

cant say much for their use of colour!

and for more info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM7HDRhViHQ

anyways whilst using the pen tools there were a few hitches due to unfamiliarity on my part, but i later realized my mistakes and corrected them, i’d trace the image using the pen tool, then i’d select all and brake apart the pen groups, allowing me to fill the images with suitable colours, here’s an example:

Adnan is packing

after we had done our seperate animation pieces we amended areas of the script, adding more cheesy dialogue, anything that could reference a cheesy movie, somthing, which i’ve experienced no shortage of. for modern cheesy action i highly recommend Taken, with liam neeson of course, it’s flawless: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0936501/

we compiled all our images and documents into each others FLA documents, and we tested if proportions had to be altered or if styles had to be changed. Overall it was a tremendous success, i was the only one who had to make changes, my characters needed to be enlarged, it looks much better now with the larger characters. adding each others content to our separate documents was an easy process, because at the very start Adnan suggested we follow naming conventions, thus all our FLA document have the same folders, so its easy to find what each one of us has been working on.

Here’s our first real representation of a scene:

its the PO leese

Week 1 Group Project: character development 1 of 2

This week for group project we are taking head shot photos of other students to use in our animation, we’ve decided to use the photo-animation technique because its funny and should suit are source material, that said; currently, absolutely none of us possess the skill or technique to get the proper results from our animation without using this technique.

We took front, back, and side shots of Mick, Carl, Dean, Adnan and myself.                                                                                                     you can see some here:

damn he's good

Adnan did some designs for our character bodies too, are focus was cheesy mixed with simplicity, our main inspiration was the www.explosm.net  cartoon “Cyanide and Happiness” We try to keep heavy focus on the cheesiness, a simple style animation will allow us to devote  more time to refining the quality.

We talked about using textures and block colours for our backdrops, we decided on simple colours over live trace and photo backgrounds as it would better compliment our characters.

we also discussed different ways of spreading our animation and its creation into the digital world through twitter, facebook etc..

Then we renamed one of our main characters; O.T. to the more easily identifiable; Roy Brennan, it was brought up as an issue at out presentation, that O Treasaigh was too difficult a name to remember; We decided that Roy Brennan was not only a typically irish name, but it was undeniably the type of name one would associate with a cop in a typical American style cop movie.

Heres Roy o Bannon, which is very close to Roy Brennan!

lastly, we began building our movie clip library in flash, we designed our first physical characters, and arranged flash into organized folders.