this is the end!

The quarter is over!!!

I am glad I took this class because I did learn a lot more about Flash than I did before so that was a lot of help! As a 2D animator I plan to use Flash a lot as my medium for animating...

As for my final project..I'm pretty happy with the way it came out...but I guess maybe there could have been some things I could have changed. The animation with the bird didn't come out PERFECTLY...if you look close enough you can see all the little messed up parts with it..I'm afraid the timing of all the scenes maybe was a little too fast? I wanted it to go fast but maybe it was too fast? I dunno. If I had more time I would have liked to have been more complex with the shape that terrorizes the bird..maybe make it evolve into much more complex abstract shapes that it would torture the bird with...

but overall I'm pretty happy with what came out!

THE ANIMATION!!!!

HERE IT IS!!! its only a little over a minute but I think that is plenty enough time...
but here is the final product...I hope you enjoy it!

My process

I figured I would explain my process on how I made this piece..might be helpful so see.....

I made everything into symbols and used motion tweening to do the animation, yet the only downside to motion tweening is if you have a lot of symbols all moving together at the same time between the start and end of the tween, parts move out of place..so after I added the tween in places I had to go back and add key frames to adjust the piece that moved out of place.

I had originally planned to animate the facial expressions within the ball symbol instead of creating separate layers for each face part on the main timeline..buuuut it didn't really work out that way and it ended up being easier for me to create a separate layer for each face piece on the main timeline...so I had a lot more layers but it worked out okay..

In each scene it was a different shape trying to torment the stupid bird...I thought i would use shape tweens a lot more but I only did for one scene...for everything else at the beginning of each scene the red ball would either appear before transforming into something else, or it would come into the new scene as a new shape....

and speaking of scenes I had 13 separate scenes not including the title and credits...I could keep everything more organized by splitting the whole animation up into scenes..the transition with each scene would happen with the background changing each time....the only thing about having lots of scenes is making sure the end of scene A matches right going into the beginning of scene B but I think I got that down pretty well.

let me see what else...animating everything wasn't that difficult since I kept the design of the characters super simple...in some parts things happening with the birds anatomy may not make sense.. especially in this scene that I'm showing a screenshot of...in some parts it doesn't make sense where the face and arms should be..this scene probably gave me the most difficulties and I had to go back and change it a lot...trying to make it look as convincing as possible that the bird was holding onto the spike as it was being whipped around..but since the bird is a abstract character made of simple shapes I figured it was okay if its parts weren't anatomically correct in all places of the animation...

as far as other problems I had..besides having to go back and tweak all the pieces after doing motion tweens I didn't really have any other problems.....overall I am pretty happy with the way the animation turned out.. its not PERFECT but I think I did pretty well and had a lot of fun making it!

its almost over!!!

I'm pretty much just tweaking little things in After Effects with the sound to make it perfect, but other than that I'm pretty much done! I am pleased with the results...

i'll put up another post to kind of explain the process I went through..might be helpful to see....

updateo

The quarter is almost overrrr!!!!

I'm now doing sound editing which I should be done with by today..I finally got the hang of After Effects and everything is running pretty smoothly.

so yeah that's about it for now!

UPDATE!!!!

I know I'm not updating as much as a should but not much has changed since I last blogged. kinda.

I'm now working on sound...a process which isn't going as easy as I thought it would...apparently, if you had sound to an animation with lots of scenes in it, the sound won't be synced to the animation when you export it as a SWF or Quicktime Movie :[ or something like that...so unless I find a way around that I can't do any sound in Flash..I guess I'll do it all in After Effects or Adobe Premiere.

anyways...I have all my sound ready and made I just have to put it in the actual animation...

and that's about it!!

quick update

I haven't updates in a while..sorry about that I've been pretty busy with this project and other stuff so I forgot to update this...

I have gotten a lot done...I added in the extra scenes and everything...I'm almost done animating all the scenes..and after that I'll start going back and tweaking everything.....



so yeah things are going pretty good!

~~~update~~~

lookit all those keyframes and layers!!!...yeah..I had originally planned to make things more organized on my timeline but it didn't really work out that way and I ended up just going with a method that made things easier for me..but it looks a little messy...but yeah, the status of my project still hasn't changed much...the only thing you could say I'm a little behind in is getting the sound effects..but I'm working on it.. the fact that I have gotten pretty far with the animation this fast is good though....I now plan to add the the extra scenes I was talking about...I will storyboard them out and post it up here soon...I'm working on a big scene right now..that the screen capture is of... it requires a good amount of animation and lots of parts that have to all be coordinated with each other and stuff..and yet the actions happen so fast you don't see a lot of the little details...but that's just the way it is...

so yeah that's it for now I guess!

update update update

well not much has changed...I am animating through the scenes of my project pretty well..I'm already halfway done! unless I don't add in the extra scenes the whole piece will be under a minute long....adding the extra scenes would add a little more...entertainment to the piece...the scene would just be the evil ball attacking the bird in a different way...I might add it in...I might not....

I started to look for sound effects but so far I haven't found anything that fits what I want...I might just make my own sound effects for some of the parts because I don't want to have sound effects that sound really cheap and sound really obvious that I got it from some website...so I still have to work on that...

otherwise everything is going fine!