Week 5: And We're Animating...

Yes, I have finally reached a point where I am animating. From my point of view, difficult to believe because of some of the things that happened this weekend (stress/anger level through the roof), but it is true. The first new shots to be animated for the film are scenes six and seven which comprise the end of the file (excluding credits). It's a moderately simple sequence except for one shot - the pull back/surprise reveal near the end of the film. It is a simple thing to create a pull back that turns into a surprise reveal on a storyboard, but animating it is quite a different thing. It was tricky to pull off - matching the motion two objects was tough enough, but part of the second object refused to become transparent and that was nearly an hour of time wasted - but it finally came together. So now the blocking for these scenes is done and I just have to go back and set up the puppet pins and do some proper animating. Hopefully that won't take very long, which in a way is kind of disappointing. All that stress filled set up for just a little bit of animating. Oh well...

In the mean time enjoy the first shot that was completed for the film (scene four) by clicking on the following: I Hate Zombies Scene 4 - come back next week for more!

Week 4: World Building

Once upon a time, I did a senior thesis project on world building. Fictional world building, that is. Literally, creating a believable universe from scratch. In the end, I made up 4 difference Earth’s that each diverged from the others through only a handful of decsions. Now, I’m faced with building a cartoon world filled with zombies and stick figure men and let me tell you, this kind of world building is a whole lot harder. I am now at the stage of production where I am creating assets for my film. Assets include, but are not limited to, props, actors, special effects, sets, and anything else that I need to make up my little world. Now, I only have to create 45 objects – that doesn’t sound like a lot. However, each of these are often made up of several smaller pieces. Each of these pieces needs to be replicated five times and subltly modified. After that, they need to be extracted separately in Photoshop and be saved as .pngs. Finally, they have to be imported into After Effects, compiled into boiling holds, combined further into the objects they were originally, rigged with puppet pin tools and then – and only then – can I start animating.

The animating is going to be cake. Getting there, well that’s another story entirely. Wish me luck. I have to get back to work now.

Week 3: Organization And A Few Other Notes

Hard to believe this is the third entry in this blog – time screams by – but it is February already. I’ve just spent the evening slogging through all the files I have and reorganizing them (and occasionally renaming them). Of course because of that I had to re-link all those lovely little files in their new homes to my main After Effects and Premier files. That took a bit of time…and re-rendering. However, now I can find everything with ease. This ultimately will make life a whole lot easier, especially when I start generating more asset files and animating scenes. Speaking of animating scenes, while I was waiting for that endless re-render I came up with a modification to my schedule. I think it’s going to be easier to create assets on a scene-by-scene basis and then animate the scene. Going with that idea, I’ve been about to rough out a rough order for the scenes to be completed (6, 7, 2, 5, 1, and 4 if I need to rework it). This makes creating this film feel a LOT less daunting than it did. So now I have to re-edit the animatic to tighten it up – it just runs too slowly. From there I have to shoot a reference video and make timing sheets for each of the scenes. Once all that’s done, it’s going to be time to get down to some serious animation.