Andrew Stover
e-Comm
hour 6-7
May 19 14
4th quarter final
This post will be long, however it needs to be done. This animation I thought of is a music video the song Hey Brother by Avicii. The animation I thought of when I drew a marine in dress uniform marching with a flag. The soldier was supposed to fade into the flag, but that didn’t really work out, as you will see. Back to how I came up with the animation. The soldier was to walk alone with him fading into the flag and have the song play while he was marching. The animation for him marching was only the first part of the animation. Because of all the delays with this part I probably won’t finish this animation any time soon.
The entire animation is going to be almost as long as the song; so around three to three and a half minutes in full length. The marching goes for basically two minutes out of the total. The rest of the animation I’m going to animate a play to come in and fly by the marching soldiers to have more of an effect, but I’m also going to animate a first person view for the pilot to look through the cockpit of the plane. That animation will last thirty to forty five seconds of the entire animation and as it ends it will wave off as it fades away to the background. I will continue that part of it next year as well as the third part of the entire animation of an armored vehicle drives by behind them as if the vehicles are charging into battle while the soldiers march on to victory. All together the animation will be almost four minutes long and have more then the one point of view for the animation and have more visual effects. What inspired me to do this animation was a combination of what I like in the military and what the song is about. This led me to draw my soldier on my sketchbook.I had the soldier in my sketchbook for around two or three weeks before the end of the third quarter of school and was still working on the detailing of it when I started listening to the song and just started imagining what the soldier would look like when I had him marching and so I started imagining more to it. After I was done I wrote it done on a piece of paper that was in my room. Then later on I couldn’t find it anywhere so I went it by ear for a while. I scanned the picture into Photoshop after eMagine, which was the end of third quarter, and later on I started to outline and color the soldier in grey-scale for the sake of I like the low color on the animation. It took a while to outline and color because I decided to make all the arts of the body a different layer or group for the soldier, like the hand, head, chest, lower and upper leg. Its own entire group so it could be maneuvered in a two dimensional body for the animation.In total it took two and a half weeks to do the soldier and take a picture of all the movements he would be doing. After I got him into after effects I began to try and set each picture in the order it would take for the soldier to march but I ran into delays. At first when I first imported it the layers were not moveable and I could not use them at all. So I trashed that set and did it again. Then I imported the second set of images and the legs were moveable but only if the pictures lined up completely on each other. So I tried again with movement of his upper body as well. It worked well but the flag animation fell apart as soon as I got the soldier to work. So then I used the light board to make a simple flag animation after doing research online with a friend to help me a bit. With the flag done I had to color the thing and import it as images like the soldier and I got the two to come together. I worked a few weeks after that to try and get the background to try and get it to time with the flag and the march.Then the soldier got corrupted so I had to retake photos again for it. And finally after all that work the background still kept giving me problems moving. So I took a break from it to look at how my friend were doing and found some good tips for the background. I got my friend to help me and she gave me some incite to what to do. I had to extend the background ad make a copy and flip it to make it look good again. Then the key frames were a little easy but it still took time to make the pace keep up with the soldiers march to make it look like they are marching because they are staying in one spot for the entire animation. But later I had to make a credit reel so I had the soldiers fade out and the creator of the songs name fade in and the everything faded to black and thanks for watching faded in and then out. Then I rendered it multiple times but still even now it hates me and won’t render good for your viewing pleasure so I’m still working on that so until it’s done I will continue to work on it. But I have included in the blog picture of the steps I have taken for the animation. I hope everyone will like it when it is done. I put a lot of work for it and I hope you all will give me feed back on it.
