1000words

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Final Report pt.2

Scene 6

This is just re-using scene3 (refer to previous post)
Although it was hastily done, it felt better than the first one. Somewhat.
I still suck at clouds. WHY.

Scene 7

Lovi turned out looking fatter than normal. What would his fans say? ~~I hope they never see this~~
But my favourite scene to do was this:

Azima and I were the ones who animated this part. Giggling while doing this was inevitable. We had a bit of difficulty with the legs as it seemed to appear out of nowhere and looked pretty awkward. In the end she said to just leave the leg layers under the body so to hide it. She had suggested we increase the frames because it was pretty abrupt.

But the director’s words are absolute.

*evil grin*

This scene also took me two days because of a certain drawing that just won’t allow me to be satisfied with it. I’m not all that happy to show you a proper picture of it but it is my pride as well:

I know Syahirahnadiah and Azima said it was pretty and all but I can’t shake off the feeling that I couldn’ve done better. If I was given some more time…well, no use crying over spilt milk ~~(lol irony)~~

ON MY OWN TIME is what I can say at the moment.

Oh, I think it should also be mentioned that we finished this scene a day before the presentation
It was killer. We spent a good portion of the day holed up at my house to get this done. I drank three cans of Nescafe Latte. With how the week progressed and my eating habit, I’m surprised I’m not going through caffeine withdrawal now.

Scene 8

This was our optional scene. Although we put it down in storyboard, but even if it wasn’t there, I figure it would be okay
…or so I told them.

Truthfully, it was as important as any other parts but I could see that everyone was exhausted by the end of the previous scene. It was also about to rain at that time. We ended up finishing half the scene before they returned home with the promise that we’ll continue the day after (Friday 13th – a.k.a day of presentation)

I really wanted to succumb to that tempting deal – even had some shut-eye in the evening to compensate on lack of sleep the previous day – but I finished it some time that night and fixed in the audio that Azima and I had chosen before.

Most of the night was spent tweaking with the frames to match the audio and it wasn’t even that satisfactory.
But the animation was complete.

credits

This was just an idea of mine. There weren’t much to credit for since everyone did the same work.

Syahirahnadiah animated the whole thing though, with only bits in the beginning done by me to show how I want the words to come in. It was all done rather quickly and after fixing in a pretty random audio, we were all set for presentation.

We even had a CD cover done by Syahirahnadiah for the occasion~

And that would be the end to this informal progress report
*faints*
I’m really sorry for the rather casual recounts. I tend to take blogging very personally.
My English isn’t the best (not being my 1st language and all) but I hope it was understandable up to this point.

Yours sincerely,
Khairun Nur Aini

Final Report pt.1

It has been more than a month since anyone updated this blog! Sorry!
In between all that time, we had finished making the animation and even did the presentation and the like.
It’s embarrassing to say but despite starting early, we had a panicky end. It was most likely because we succumbed to procrastination somewhere in the middle.

OTL OTL

That aside, I guess now that the animation is ready, I should show it here right?

*deep sigh*

I can’t though. At least not now. I do have plans to post this somewhere on the internet. If only I knew how to do that ‘loading bar’ thing in flash, then I could’ve put it on Deviant Art.

*bricked*

We’re fast getting side-tracked by my babbling!

Since I can’t show the flash yet, I’ll show you screencaps of it, scene by scene! (because I like to do useless stuff like that)

Before that, look at our library~!

I take pride in how arranged I am. I forced this kind of thing on my teammates too! (But that’s only because I clean up the library all the time). It’s not really a necessary thing to do but I realize from the start that our flash would end up being big and I don’t want to keep being lost trying to go through every single item in the library to look for stuff.

I am convinced of this because a certain team member (who took Multimedia Authoring) had trouble locating the things she want due to not taking the trouble to label them properly.

Here’s what one folder looks like in our library:

Because we work in a group, I need to make sure other teammates understand just what is what so I take the trouble of re-naming them as I see fit. Despite that, however, it’ll still be difficult for outsiders to understand. It’s kind of like a secret code only our group can comprehend lol!
*bricked*

Admittedly, I drew most of the things in our animation but that’s only due to the fact that I can draw and I have a drawing tablet. It’s also because I have a passion for drawing!
My teammates still drew some stuff (It’s embarrassing to admit that I ended up hogging all the work to the point where they have to force me to give them work. I’m so evil *headdesk*)
OTL

Other than folder and symbol names, I also make sure the layers are named appropriately:

It’s not that important because I keep stacking them above each other when moving on to the next part but I like being arranged.

And…uh…yeah…I hear grumbles from my teammate about this troublesome quirk I have ^^;
Moving on!
It’s time to go through it scene by scene~

Title scene

I think we have the gif of it here already. When I did the drawing and animation for this, I was still testing waters in flash.

It’s hard to admit but this is my first real animation. Prior to this, I rarely use flash and hardly ever tried doing animation. My first real flash work was under Ms. Xuan when I took Multimedia Authoring alongside Syahirahnadiah and Akmal Hakim. We learnt very basic flash movements but it was enough to give me a basic understanding of how tweens work.

Scene 1

I wonder if I can admit it now but…

Actually…

I’ve never liked drawing cats! I have trouble drawing them since forever! I just have difficulty drawing animals in any form before this. I still believe I suck at drawing them but at least people can still tell they are cats instead of….well, something else entirely. During the brainstorming process for the storyline, I had wanted to suggest drawing mochitalia:

It was also a sub-series of Hetalia but the problem now was, I don’t know how mochis move when they are animated! Mochitalia hasn’t been animated yet at that time so I couldn’t imagine how they move. It was probably easier to draw them though!

But it’s all done now. Maybe, on my own time, I’ll do a mochitalia animation.

Scene 2

I think I quite enjoyed doing this part because I was experimenting on mouth and eyelid movements. Arthur (cat with brown spots and green eyes) was a bit difficult to do because of the brown spot covering half his face. Once I found out how they worked, I handed over the task to another teammate.

Scene 3

EVEN THOUGH I WAS PAYING ATTENTION IN CLASS

*sobs*

This was one of the dolly left scenes in which Feli was walking towards Kiku’s house. Sir had taught us about it in class b-b-but t-t-the clouds just. Wouldn’t. Move. Correctly. Ugh.

I tinkered with this far longer than I thought I should have.

I should also mention that both backgrounds were done by Syahirahnadiah and Akmal Hakim. It’s kind of cool really because I ultimately suck at making these backgrounds from shape alone. I think I rely too heavily on my tablet that it inadvertently became my weakness ~~but hopefully not downfall~~

What would I do without you, tablet-san?
OTL

scene 4

Watching my teammates struggle to animate this is always amusing.

Have I turned into a sadist? Of course not

*evil chuckle*
But it’s only amusing because taking apart everything was a right bi- I-I mean difficult. Yeah, it was difficult.

scene 5

Around this time, we had already reached the point where things moved too quickly for our liking. Meeting up at college was no longer enough and Syahirahnadiah and Azima practically camped out at my home to get things done. We had problems left and right, I’m pretty surprised my laptop even made it through the ordeal that it had to go through.

Taimu-san (I name my laptop, so?) hasn’t been in a good condition from the start of sem and any form of Adobe software was taxing on it. I had to do several backups in case Taimu-san crashed for good. Even from the beginning, my Flash software would die in the middle of doing a work.

Since our 2D headquarters was my laptop, we all had agreed to make ctrl+s our best friend and ctrl+z our enemy. It was that bad. They still did other parts on their own – poor Syahirahnadiah had to constantly borrow Akmal Hakim’s due to her laptop’s monitor getting busted by her brother and Azima had to use another friend’s as well because her notebook couldn’t host Adobe anymore.

I, myself, was not better off. This animation project was my pride and happiness yet I still had other obligations as a student.

This scene marked the start of our panic week.

Well, this is it for the 1st part. I started writing this 3 hours ago so I need to take a break. Hopefully the 2nd part will get done soon (depending on my internet connection and my will)
Sorry for all the babbling! I tend to do that in blogs...
Come to think about it, my report was 90% babbling about personal stuff and 10% keeping with the flash things
SORRY!!