Animatic

I had a go at creating an anamatic! It's a bit shaky and wobbly in places, and the sound isn't spot on. Adding to that, I'm not sure what I can or cannot create in After Effects. This is what I'm aiming for though, and I'll see what happens when I started to actually work on it.

After Effects Practice

The aim of this exercise was to manipulate several assets into an animation. They were all still images, and inherently had no animation in them. With them, we needed to create a scene of a quad bike passing across terrain. It went a lot easier than I expected, as I'd done this sort of movement before in other programs like Flash. I knew the eases and general movement that the background layers needed, to give the effect of movement. Still, I know a lot more about after effects now, as I didn't have a clue on how to animate movement, as well as a few animation presets which could come in useful later on.

After Effects Testing

I've never used after effects at all before, so the introduction lesson to it was an interesting one. I had no idea what to expect really, and the program still intimidates me. I'm beginning to get the basics of it down, however. In this exercise, it was just a matter of importing and arranging various sound and movie files into it and applying effects to them. The amount of effects is staggering, and I'll have to look at a tutorial on how they work more.

Storyboards

 They're a little bit rougher than I'd like them to, because I haven't completely figured out what I'm going to do yet. They may be subject to a lot of change later on!

Charcter Design

This time, I focused on desgining the actual character. Simon had mentioned he liked Warlocks, and that seemed a good direction to go with. I drew him as one, and decided to do something different with the colouring. The colours used are actually textures from photographs, and fiddled about a bit with Photoshop filters such as Dry Brush, along with a dark opacity brush over the top to emphasise shadow. These textures are mainly found from google, but as I progress I would like to use them from photos I've gathered myself.

Charcter Design

Some preliminary character design. It wasn't so much designing Simon's character, but finding out what he would look like drawn in my style. It's a good start, I think. I need some sort of foothold to go on when I progress.

Photoshop Exercises

I already knew how to use the tools required to make this, but it was a good exercise to do nonetheless. They're not tools I use often, so to brush up on them was a nice exercise to do. After using the stock paper and wood background, I added some things of my own I could pluck off the internet. The first is a sticky note, which was simple enough to cut out from the white background it was on. The rest are drawings done with the pen tool, although some bear a few differences.

The computer and the guy in the chair are done by tracing over an image, and the dinosaur coming out from behind the note is drawn free hand. On all of these, I ran across randomly with an opacity-pressured brush, to give an effect of there being a tone difference throughout it. I then used the diffuse filter a couple of times, mimicking the effect of the pen soaking into the paper. It came out alright, I think! I don't use these tools much at all.