Story time!

What's going on:

What is the best way to remember things?

-Recently we have been talking about doing something for an outside group or organization. so what I have been doing is making up a little short story book animation. 

Storyboards:

• These are the storyboards that I had made up for the animation i am thinking of. from these I am probably going to make changes in the transitions so it looks better, but this is my idea so far. I have a rough animation of the pages and my voice reading the text. 

   

Rough animation:

It's Time for the Mages!

  

Imagine a world where magic and the unknown are true.  

this is what I have been working on for the past few weeks.

Over View:

• I have been busy with this new animation with my friends. My friends  Logan Keck, Laura Armstrong, Jacob Williamson, Alex Schmidt all got together to create this . The idea we came up with was a magic show that turns into a little more action packed. We worked hard on this and hope we did a good job. 

• The things we wanted to put into this was to have a fantasy aspect to it. We all talked about the idea that was to be decided on. The group had many ideas to begin with but finally slashed all, but the one on the mage wars. the roles were given out later after developing the story. I was an actor, and an editor, Logan was a actor, and an editor, Alex was an actor, editor, and choreographer *note not a director and Laura was an editor and actor, and finally Jake was the camera man and  an editor.

 Materials: 

• We then went to film it to have an outline of what we wanted to do. after story boarding on the idea of what props we had to. We assigned roles for every one and I was an actor and an editor for the green screening we had to do.

Rough Video:

• The rough was of the original idea we all came up with. it shows what the story of the stop motion animation, and it was our way of story boarding for this animation. 

Rough Pictures:

• The process of the taking pictures took longer than expected, but we had some set backs and over came them by re-shooting pictures. We learned that a green screen has to be a exact color or it will show shadows. along the way with the filming we learned how to key-light the photos to make them have a PNG type backing of Transparent in the Adobe After Effects program. If there was anything we could have done differently it would be the way we used to try and fix the shadows on the green screen and how shaky the camera man's hands were. Still some things I would keep the same would be the idea we had, and the method used to capture the pictures, with the green screen, and camera used.

• If there was anything we could have done differently it would be the way we used to try and fix the shadows on the green screen and how shaky the camera man's hands were. Still some things I would keep the same would be the idea we had, and the method used to capture the pictures, with the green screen, and camera used.

• These are what the pictures look like before we edited them with the Key-Lighting on our program. Still as you can see the lighting is harsh so we have to deal with that before finishing. However after all the work is put into this project I believe it will work out and be beautiful.

edited video:

                                       

• This is what we have after editing some of the scenes. The animation is not finished, but it should be on it's way soon.

 Finished Product:

• With the final video here we changed up a few things. thew ending actions are different from the original in the rough video. the war seen was switched to a wild west theme showdown. the original was a blinding light consuming the cast and fades into the credits. The ending is really the only thing changed but for a first project like this i feel it turned out well.

Group Blogs:

Logan Keck

Jacob Williamson

Alex Schmidt

Laura Armstrong

Post Project

Summary

• from the start of the year I forgot a bit from last year. the last project that I did i watched videos from lynda.com about moveable limbs for characters and I started to do that, so I made a stick man character with a funky head for the project to re-immerse myself back into what I am going to have the story be. the character is at andrew-miles-stover.blogspot.com/Andrew_Stover. the story is of the character getting scared from the mirror after getting home from work. what I wanted for the audience to have was a bit of excitement. Over the last weeks that I have worked a few events, and problems have popped up, and conflicted with this project. The program that I am in wanted to make a promo-video to recruit more people with. a few problems that I came into having was I finished the character's body with it's movable limbs in Photoshop. after i finished i imported the characters file into Adobe After Effects and began the process of animating him. There is where the problem began. after importing the file i found that the body's limbs were not movable no matter how i reimported it. so to fix that I saved every single movement transitions that the character does as an image and imported them in one by one. those were the biggest challenges. the other ones were when the character jumps and how you can see through his head, and that the audio that i used was good but needed more critique to make it better. if I could fix a part of this animation it would be when the character jumps from being scared. I feel that for the first animation that i have done in three months it's pretty good to get back into the swing of this. some thing that others said were that the animation was good with the actions, but what they said was bad was the audio and the flow of the animation. I have re-rendered out this animations with changes to it to fix a few of the problems that I have stated earlier. I hope this makes it a bit bettewr than before enjoy.

         

final

final update:

                The animation has come together and the sounds and voices are finaly in and i have edited it to match the best i could. the process for making this animation was to save png files with their clear background to import into After Effects. there were many images saved and each movement of the character is it's own set. i will be putting the images and the video in the next few posts to fit it all in. the character and sounds took a while, but with the help of the people around me i was able to finish this thirty second animation; the story for this animation is the character gets home and is breaking the fourth wall by talking to the audience, but is tired from a long days work and starts seeing things. thats really all thats there. the video and other files will be below.