Ball Drops in Maya.

Using Maya I animated a ball doing a regular bounce and then one with 'character'. In all honesty Maya is a difficult software for me to understand but slowly and surely I will get there. I feel like I can improve both of them in different ways. The regular drop needs to have a smoother bounce and look more natural, same goes with the second bounce. I had more problems with the second bounce actually.. The program kept lagging a bit and then I ended up getting the timings wrong, the more I tried to fix it the more it seemed to mess up. I realised the bounce the ball makes to reach the arch is too slow and I'd like to redo this very soon and correct the timings. 

Character Positions!

With a given rig, eleven, I had to demonstrate different emotions through positions. At first I couldn't figure out how to change the positions of the individual fingers or things like how to shut the eye lids. The more I played around with the rig the more I got into it. I'd like to explore this more and try animating the eleven rig showing emotions. I think to improve the positions I could slightly exaggerate certain aspects to give more of a feel for it.. for example, the 'frightened' position, I could have had him bent further back, shrink his pupils, make his mouth drop more. 

Frightened.

Hap-hap-Happy.

'Stress sir, it's a killer'

Sleepy.

This is a short animation that we had to work on on flash. We were given a mesh up of different sounds and had to create an animation using different flash techniques. I tried to experiment with a different style than I'm used to, using more color as opposed to black and white then a dash of color. I'm not very pleased with this one but I'm glad I did something a little different than my normal self. 

I've been working on a side project since coming back home. It is based on something I used to imagine as a child.. I would listen to a song and watch the clouds and imagine to faint dancers merging in and out of the clouds, making their way through the sky. I thought I could attempt bringing that to life. I have been doing some timelapses from my home and when I have a large collection I will start editing and animating on top of it.
So far there have been some errors, but hey, trial and error always gets you to the end result. I have been doing tests using my iphone mainly, working out the time intervals and exposure needed, different angles. When I get a hold of a proper camera I will start using that instead for better quality.
I've always been interested in animations that involve real films as well and I absolutely love timelapses. Here are some things that inspire me and get me motivated all the time.

Here is the quick timelapse I did yesterday afternoon. The quality dropped in the transfer but I will get up a better quality when I have more stuff going.

I started with 10second intervals between each photo taken but I thought that was too quick so did some 5second ones. However, it was an incredibly windy and stormy day here so fingers crossed tomorrow will be better.

Another storyboard..  

This time we were given a short script and we had to make a storyboard for it. I felt a little pressed for time, it was a challenge but I learnt from it. Over December I will be adding more frames,adjusting colors, compositions and character designs to add fluidity and drama to the storyboard. I feel I need to add more frames in the last scene as well as more engaging compositions, something interesting. I will be making an animatic for this storyboard as soon as I return to Falmouth as I don't have the software to do it with me now.

I haven't done much uploading lately so I'm going to be doing some catching up :)

This is the storyboard I worked on showing two different characters travelling at different distances in different directions that eventually meet. Looking back at it now I can see the mistakes I made and would like to correct them, for example the first three frames, the fish is meant to travel from stage left to right but the second frame I drew the fish swimming from right to left. That mistake can cause a confusion and change the pace of the whole thing.

||Cubey Adventures||

Another set of assignments included animating a cube character using Adobe Flash CS6. We couldn't add facial expressions or details in the body, it was all about concentrating on the movement and the body language of the character. I had to animate it jumping, reacting with another cubey character which played the role of an older person (i.e older sibling, parent, guardian) and it hearing a sound out of shot and reacting to it. I'm quite pleased with the jump, I feel like I got the timings more or less right however with the reaction to the sound one I think I should have done it slower to give it more of a sense of drama. Same with the one with another Cubey, it would have been more effective if the movements were slightly slower.