TARBOY

i've been thinking about doing the majority of my animation in Flash. i still can't tell if its going to make my life easier or frustrate me beyond belief. I was curious as to the types of things that can effectively be done in flash, so i started looking around to give myself hope, and i found TARBOY.

obviously, i am not expecting my first flash animation to be this refined, but it did give me ideas of how i could use similar effects to my own benefit. seeing how they used things like transparencies in a way that is similar to what i wish to accomplish within my animation was relieving and helpful. i also recognized some other effects such as shape tweens and various other tweens and filters (and a tasteful use of gradients, too) which seeing used within a context helped me to fully understand how they can properly be executed.

i don't usually find looking at other artists work helpful for me, but in the case of animation, watching videos and animated shorts has helped me develop my ideas into images which are actually possible for me to realize.

Photoshop has quit unexpectedly.

sooooooooooo i decided to try to use my laptop and a 7 or 8 year old photoshop elements to get some of the backgrounds digitized, because my tablet is pressure sensitive and that is essential to get the look im trying to accomplish.. yep, the tablet drivers are still yet to be installed on the computers in the mac lab (not impressed) so this seemed like a good option. or at least a half decent one. as long as i keep the layers right, all i'd have to do is transfer it to the maclab and animate it there. anyways, the selection tools on this version obviously are not up to par with that of CS5, so i decided to hand draw some new backgrounds and cut out the middle man. i found a pressure sensitive brush that works really well, and i was really excited with the results i was getting. so i went to add the colour and SURPRISE photoshop froze. i think my version is too early to actually have the "photoshop has quit unexpectedly" notification, so i just sat infront of my laptop for a half hour praying for that little blue circle to stop spinning and for photoshop to come back to life. but alas, it did not.

i just hope CS5 is better for it than CS3 was last year, i was on the verge of putting my face through the montior by the end of it. you'd think i would have learned to save excessively by now.

i'm thinking about doing an animation for my independent project, and i'm pretty excited about it. i've always been interested in animation, when i was about 11 i made my first sort-of animation set to the song "wouldn't it be nice" by the beach boys. I made it by creating drawings in ms paint, and placing them in succession into windows movie maker, making the clips as short as i could, kind of like the different frames in photoshop animation but not as convenient. i'd really like to find the video and watch it, i think my parents still have it somewhere. I've made several other videos in the same way since then but unfortunately i haven't kept track of them so they're lost within the files of my parents computers. a bit before that i used to play around with power point using hyperlinks, transitions and the default shapes to create little games or just little digital spaces to explore. i remember one i made was a haunted house with an elevator, and each number in the elevator was a hyperlink button going to a different floor, and every floor was some kind of spooky room with a vampire or a ghost or a witch, etc. i'd actually like to find that too, because as i think about i remember how strangely intricate i was actually making it with what was available on the program.

anyways, i've been researching 2D animation a little and i've found some really cool animators and a really helpful blog about 2D and hand drawn animation. animators seem to be really fighting to keep the 2D aesthetic alive. one animator i heard about about a year or so ago is anthony francisco schepperd, and he's fantastic. the first animation of his that i saw was a music video he made for a song called "the music scene". it's pretty much everything i want in an animation. so cool.

the other dude who's work i saw recently is nelson boles. i only came across him the other day, and i was super interested in his style of animation. both of these dudes use after effects to perfect the look of the animation, which is kinda cool. i'd really like to try after effects out.

i'm pretty much decided on the whole animation thing, i'm really glad we have the whole semester for this.

new year, new semester, new ideas

i kind of cant believe its january again already. but alas, it is, and although i really enjoyed the break i'm excited to see what will come of this semester. i have a few ideas of directions in which i want to start taking my work, ideas i want to explore, and limits i'd like to experiment with and exceed. i feel like i've been building towards taking huge steps towards where i really want to be with my art eventually, and i'm really looking forward to continuing that exploration and gaining more and more momentum.

i feel like i'm onto something, and i'm excited to find out what it is.

video.

FINALLY. I accidently left Youtube on on my account over night, but thankfully it actually completed downloading and no one messed with my account between 1:30 yesterday afternoon and now. 7 attempts later, here is the video.

enjoy, dudes.

the waiting game.

As if waiting for my video to render every time I made any changes during editing wasn't bad enough, now I have to spend even more time waiting for my video to upload onto the internet. My video wouldn't fit on vimeo, so I have resorted to Youtube. Unfortunately, I have been here for about an hour now, and I'm still only at about 29%. Coooool that it's taking so long, and that I have other things to do today. Cool Youtube. Cool and speedy. Speedy and efficient use of my time. Glad.

Whatever, I'll have the video up soon enough hopefully. 

Behhhh. 

no room to live

I've been thinking about using animation and realtime video for this video project, and it reminded me of this super cool video I saw. It's Times New Viking's video for their song No Room to Live.  The band shot the video originally on film, then split up the individual frames and sent bunches of them to a differnt artists telling them to animate them as they wished. Such a great idea. Such a sweet sweet video.