Animation Project, from rocking balls to walking men

For my last project in Multi-Media, i am working on the "Animation" module in class, but the kicker was that the Teacher gave me creative freedom on how to present this project.
So the first thing i did was i read the book "The Animators Survival Guide" written by Richard Williams, the Head animator who animated "Who Framed Rodger Rabbit". It is great reference material, and taught me everything about animation to date. The first thing it showed me is how i have to take a ball on a string, and to show how it moves depending how frequent the frames are or not.
If you want to make the shot more, you will have less frames beside others.
But if you want to have a slower shot, then you would need to have more frequent frames side by side.
For one shot, you need your "Extremes", these are the main actions in a shot, for instance if i was making a ball on a string, then i would make it start left on the first extreme, and right on the last extreme. Whatever frames are in the middle of these Extremes is simply called the "Inbetweeners", these frames are the most important cause they build the actions for the shot.

After i figured out what needs to be done, i started drawing my walking animation.
To the right you can see the last frame marked the end, walk. In total, it has a grand number of 21 frames or pages. This took about 2 to 3 days of picking at it, and planning what to draw where.
It was a good start despite doing very little animation.








Here you can see, i made a similar animation in the Pencil program. This one has a grand total of 30 frames, but i set the speed for 8 frames/second. Yet this one is not finished due to time constraint. i was gonna have him walk over to a box and open it, but he is only walking up to it.


I can for surely say that this a great start for hopefully a future animator/director.

Final blog post (Bird House 4)

So from the start of this project, we ( I ) learned how to work a bit better along side others to complete a similar goal. The idea of "completing the bird house distracted me from my shyness around people, i guess you can say.As a team, we learned to build up skills needed for an assential team, such as working together to build a spaghetti and tape tower. This project was great for building up skills such as leadership, courage to a certain degree, and wisdom.
I personally felt like a leader while building the tower cause i threw out my ideas to people in my group like etc,"we should do this..., or what about this cause.......".
Even knowing my ideas at the end of the project didn't turn out very well, we didn't care much, i think it was more about the experience more than actually wining the challenge.

As the project went on, i used my knowledge of building up the towers to the program of google sketch-up. when i was building up the tower on the computer, i had to make sure that each individual piece connected together accurately without failure. If i was gonna print it out at the time right off the back, then the pieces and tabs wouldn't fit into the holes, and it would be ruined. So trial and trial again through several cardboard copies, and demo's i finally came up with a good solid bird house ( Chickadee ). And it only took a good two weeks to complete, the only reason it took this long was because that we fell into difficulties with scheduling, and etc.

Through-out these two weeks i had to overcome several challenges. The challenges i had to overcome are some which included overcoming the troubled schedule.
The schedule was a problem cause we had random events that appeared every so often, that would slow down our work progress, and make us fall behind.
Another problem was trying to work together at certain points, but really that would be my problem. At the time, i could be a bit more assertive, but its not in my nature to do that. So the problem was that certain people would not work together, like they would sit around, and play on their phone. But like i said, i should of said something, but i explained already.
Last problem was construction of the bird house. It was a problem cause everyone on my team had an idea to build it, but we weren't getting anywhere. After a while though, i decided to take control, and to get this project going.

It all worked out in the end though, and it looks good.

 Ok here we are, once it dries, we will put them up in the woods, and watch as the birds come to my house.

I have to admit, putting the pieces together was the hardest part because we glued them together, and then they were on the wrong way then we had to reposition them, it was chaos.

But we did it, its completed after 2 weeks we are finally done.

Today in industry we use this type of method of design today. Starting from a sketch, to a rough model to the complete working model.

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What i am learning know will better me for the future of design.

I am going into the Animation industry and i will have to know the methods of design, definitely. when i am in the industry, i will have to work with a large group of committed people for their job, and this, what we (I) am doing in class will better me for the future.

Lazer cutting is a great innovation for design. Its not just helping hobbyists make a bird house, but high corporate owners making their next big creation.
Its a great and high paying industry, from big to small lazer cutters, everyone wants at it. The lazer could create the next big invention, or it could even as little as be a coster for your bed side table.
The possibilities are endless with the lazer cutters, and even know in the modern era, lazer cutters are becoming more advanced.
Lazer's are becoming the next big thing, next to the 3d printer, but thats another story all to its self.
Well i guess that ends my final blog post for a while, i will try to stay in touch, later. :D

Almost Done (Bird House 3)

 Ok we are into our 3-4th day, and so far we are working on making a actual cardboard birdhouse. We are making it out of cardboard to start off is because we are making all of the pieces in google sketch-up, and we need to see if the pieces will fit correctly.
So we started working on sketch up, and every so often my team and i will switch jobs from blogging to working on the model. I find when your working with sketch-up, and i know this may sound obvious, but you really have to make sure that your measurements are accurate.
When we made our 2nd cardboard model, we had some difficulties with the roof to floor measurement. But like all things, we just have to look around it.
And hopefully, i will be finished by next blog post.

Continuing the Project (Bird House 2)

 So for this Assignment, my team worked on making rough drafts of the possible bird house. To be honest, i wasn't here because i was sick (still am) so i got the gist of what my team did yesterday. So to begin, my team made paper copies of the pieces of the bird house, then traced it on to cardboard.
At that point, they tapped the pieces together, and their you go.
What i have to say, and they admit it too, is that it was crocked. The thing they said they needed to improve on is not the measurement of the pieces, but they needed to improve on sticking the pieces together.

The project itself went well, but their was a lack of teamwork.
They did help, but it went down to one person doing all of the work.

All in all, the project went well, but their needs to be more organization,
and i won't try to be sick again.

Starting our Project (Bird House 1)

Well here i go again, i have a brand new project to work on, this project is going to be making bird houses. In class, we reviewed the steps of creating (my class), and what will be required to make a bird house.

But before we get out of hand, what bird are we gonna make this for. We cant just rush into this without knowing what bird we will be making. My class, and the grade 9's are working together to work on this bird house. We were split up into groups of 4, 2 grade 12 or 11 or 10's (Me), and 2 grade 9's. My group was given the task to make a Chickadee bird house. To make this project successful, we drought down all the info we know about the Chickadee on to a poster.

We also had the help of the internet for information on the chickadee.

I have to admit, so far we are doing pretty good.

We all collect information as a group, and we draught it down.

But off course like all groups i have that one partner that doesn't do a thing.

this is a problem cause he easily gets bored, and does the most random stuff to get amused to.

But how i can solve this problem, is to find him something to do.

I also had to overcome the problem of my "Quiet" nature, if you know what i mean.

how i solved this was that my group was even quieter than me so i spoke up.

The last problem was that i am terrible at math, but how i solved this is that my team is good at math.

We work together to accomplish our goal, and we split our time efficiently.

I usually brainstorm ideas, and present them to the group.

But this is only the beginning, we will se where this project takes me in the future. 

Iron Man Mask/Poster

This is My Iron Man Movie Poster. Personally this was one of the hardest projects to work on, i dont know why it just was.
But at the end, i came up victorious over this project. I personally like the Black and white pencil drawn look.

Scanner Darkly Project (Mr.Bean)

This is my Scanner Darkly Project Finally done after a week or less of work, but i found it was worth the effort. It looks simply amazing, my opinion of course.
it took me a while cause some tools were tedious, but once i got into the groove of them, it was ok.
I can officially say i am done this Project, i hope to make more, this was fun.