Another crack at lip syncing.

Thought i would try and record my own voice and do a short lip sync animation. I think its quite funny.

First go at lip syncing.

We had a go at lip-syncing in flash today, it was ok, but i can also see it can be very time consuming and also very rewarding at the same time. The planning side of this is very important as you have to make all the mouth shapes for the noises before you start; this enables you to have a clear run at your animating.

Our crack at live@5.

Today we were given the reigns of the graphics production for this weeks live@5 production. The day started with my train being half an hour late (which it has'nt been recently, typical), and then straight on with programming the sports chart. This was done with after effects-screenshots to follow- and all the team logos were provided and put in place.

I found that the use of straight cuts instead of dissolved cuts was not what i was used to as the footage sometimes has to be paused and if the pictures were opaque it could lead to a shot that was 'washed-out'.

The next thing that i got involved in was the weather symbols. We managed to make an animated rain symbol (the only symbol we needed-typical) using flash. This we saved as a quicktime movie and created a mask to alpha the white from the graphic. I am sure there is a way of exporting the work with an alpha level, but at the moment we are not sure how to do this. (It could be that we just have to save it as a .swf file and after-effects would recognise this?)

All in all as a team we worked quite well, we had a feel of the stress that the news team are under and the only thing that went wrong was the weather guy was filmed on the wrong side of the screen; so he was standing in front of our chart. This could have been remidied by a simple horizontal transform, but by the time we realised what had happened it was 16:30.

As this was not really our fault as the graphics had been done first, i think we can feel quite happy with ourselves.

A little bit more artwork

Just love this video and song...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acay3S2PhSg Its a great piece of work, and a great collaboration between the musicians and the animators.
It also shows the workings of a simple stop frame animation which is very interesting indeed. I love it.

Backgrounds

These are some backgrounds i have done using different mediums. The top one i have used pencil and then scanned it into photoshop and then used gradients, layers and various selection techniques to get the feel of a desert at sun-up. The problem i had with the printing of the background was that the colour management chain from the macine t the key drive and then on to the printer made the image a lot darker.

The middle one is a 3-d mock up of a front room. I also had trouble with the lighting on this.

The last one is made using photoshop brushes and distorted rectangles only. Hence the roughness.

More artwork to follow.

Chew. And spit.

We have been asked to come up with an ident for an on-line t.v. station called Chew tv. The station has been running for a couple of years now and is looking to re-hash its image with the target audience moving from 11-19 year olds to 17-25's. The company has given us a breif and some printed material to hint at the kind of flavour that they want.
My initial reaction of having to do an ident aimed at this age group was to go out and drink some cider and get me 'teenage head' back on. Then i began thinking that i never really took it off and this realisation has given me the confidence to come up with some great ideas (well i think so anyway).
The pitch is on Thursday and by that time we have to decide which one of the ideas that we are going to go for. I am in a small team with Gabriel who is probably the nearest to my age in the group. This project is going to rock. We can not wait.

Thoughts provoked by ideology and realism readings.

Can't help thinking that the creative boundaries of western animation were stifled some time in the 1930's by none other than Mr Walt Disney. His industrialisation of animation and mass marketing of his product inserted a broomhandle up the back of the whole of the artform in western society and formatted animation in a new way. The free flowing unreal animations that were made before with their impossible characters and form were lost for this 'staged' type format. I can't help thinking that the driving force behind this change was the capitalist ideology and the need for a product. This is backed up with the emergence of Mickey mouse clubs throughout the USA and the introduction of branding. This not only made sure that Disney was a weekend thing but made it into the family home as well. All of Disney's animations follow his hyper-real formtting except for maybe fantasia (and this you could argue is a fore-runner of the modern pop video), and i am afraid that they stopped a lot of other animations making it to the surface of popular viewing.