Final Discovery animtion

Well, to be completely honest I was not very happy with the animation once I scanned it in and put it together. As for the sound bed I thought I wanted something like an acoustic guitar playing an upbeat tune. Then I immediately remember how I researched Neverhood for the Animation Skills module and its soundtrack. 

The sound bed for Neverhood is absolutely genius, but one track in particular fitted my animation perfectly. However I did had to speed up the tempo and cut it up in a way that it would synch with the animation. After the crit session I realised how much the I dent looked better just because of the sound bed and I realised how much of a change the music has made. Now I am never going to underestimate the power of a good soundtrack.

Also the crit session provided me with some really beneficial feedback. However I am a bit disappointed that I did not manage to apply any significant changes. But if I came back to these projects later on I would know what to correct. for instance on the E4 logo, the composition in one point was a bit too much to the left, as for the Discovery one, I could make it look more sketchy or finalise it, because at this point it needs tweaking.

Well in a nutshell I took a lot from making these idents and I am not ashamed to sign my name under them. In fact Im proud of what I learned while making them. 

Animating with Maya part four

So this time I animated a segmented pendulum. This time the pendulum required qorking with the motion graph, so it turned out really beneficial that I have learned how to use it before hand in the bouncing ball task. All I had to do was delay the lower parts of the segmented pendulum so it would make the effect of secondary action.
This is how it turned out-

Animating with Maya part three

So this was what I should have started with but I avoided it a bit because we were showed how to do it but I didn't take any notes and forgot (oopsy doopsy). But finally came around to do it and the way I learned, was to make a motion path for the camera. The fun part was playing around with the motion path, rotating it and moving around, seeing how it looks.
So the model that I made earlier was a pen, so made a turn table of it, since a pretty boring shape I rotated it in a more interesting angle. There we go-

I actually made two turn tables, one with a ground lever motion path, and this one. I liked this one more because it just looks more interesting than a boring old simple turntable.

Animating with Maya part two

So this time I animated a pendulum!
The problem I ran into straight away was how to change the anchor point. Back in the keep up trucking workshop we were showed how to group objects together so they move together not as single items, but once i grouped my pendulum together all I needed to do was put the anchor point on the top so it would swing. Once I figured out how to that (which was very easy apparently) everything else was a piece of cake. I also learned how to fiddle with the render options like lighting and camera angles so that was super useful.
Heres the end result-

Animating with Maya

Okay so we hand to learn how to animate basic stuff on Maya.
To be honest, I have really mixed feelings about Maya. In the begging it is so hard to wrap your head around it, all those menus inside of menus, buttons on buttons and all these different things that trigger other things. It just makes you hate Maya with all your soul. But once you get something decent rendered out you are overwhelmed with this satisfaction like "look what I made!"
I started off with the bouncing ball because it seemed like the easiest one. But on Maya nothing is easy if you're a beginner. But once I got the hang of key framing, I tried playing around with the motion graph and it was pretty fun. So this turned out to be cool after all-

Soundbed for the E4 ident

 So during the Easter Break I did not manage to get anything done, but I did manage to ask someone else to do something for me. I asked a friend to make a sound bed for the E4 ident. I did not give any specific demands or requests on the music, only that it has to be at least somewhat synched with the animation. I am really satisfied with the end result-

Animating Discovery ident

After working out the keyframes, where and how many in-betweens I should place, I finally started animating the Discovery ident.
I broke the ident to five parts- the four running circles and the zoom out in the end. I worked out the frames with one running circle and applied that to all the other three.
After some tedious filling in the in betweens I was finally ready to digitalise the frames. So once again I used Dragon Frame, which once again speeded up the process.
I was not very happy with the result because it feels that it needs more finalising, but given that the deadline is way too close to colour all frames on photoshop ill try and make it look more finalised in some way.

Ceramics Induction 3

So since we got our models done, detailed and refined, the model was ready for the next stage.We took took the model off the board and and covered it in a bed of clay, like this

Then we made a coffin out of the bed like this-

This was followed by a lesson on how to mix plaster and how to use it. We were asked to ensure our character coffin walls were sturdy so this doesn't happen, when we put the plaster on to the models-

So when the plaster hardened we had one side of the mould, which looked like this-

Then we made the other side of the mould and when I took my Palestine character out it looked like this-

Then we made a foam mixture, put the mould together and tied it with a rubber band, so when the foam expands, it does not escape from unnecessary parts, and poured the foam inside through the feet. I learned that using foam it is necessary to mix it as hard as you can and as quick as you can before you pour it in. And when the foam started to rise, some of the characters did not have hands. Well its because when the foam was rising, air was trapped in the arms, so it made an air pocket. Thats when i realised i needed to carve small tunnels letting out the air where necessary.
So this is how it looked when it was finished-

Overall I really loved these sessions because they showed me that ceramics can be fun, and it was interesting work with all these different materials and also just making something with your own hands. So if I ever have a stop motion animation, I will know what to do!

Ceramics Induction 2

For the next session we took our skeletons with the harden milliput and just basically put plastacine on it. This part I enjoyed the most because we were modelling the character, it was basically just shaping the form, making it look more and more like the sketch and finally working out the detailed bits. To me this was the best part of the ceramics induction.

And now the model is ready for the next stage...

Ceramics Induction

So recently we had a ceramics induction which was amazing!

We were asked to make a model of our own made up character.

We started out making a few sketches of our character and then drawing the finalised version on a a4 paper in real size. Then we drew in the skeleton of the character. Afterwards we made the so called skeleton from wire and attached it to a board. We also put this material called Milliput on the limbs and head, so as to give the skeleton a more firm base.

So that was the first session and it we left the models to set so the milliput would harden for the next stage.