During my day off I decided to start work on something that Annabeth suggested to me and that was my animatic for my side of the City life project and if I had time to do the title sequence for our group project. The animatic would be done in after effects and this would also at the same time help me to learn how motion comic animators do their work and give me an idea of what tools or techniques to use in my motion comic projects that I may do over the christmas break. Before I could start animating I needed to isolate the scenes and frames for my piece so I looked to my story boards and using Photoshop I isolated the scenes from each sheet and saved them as numbered scenes as shown on the boards themselves.
These were then imported one by one into After effects and then I began recording sounds and dialogue for the characters. Being a good character impersonator I did know that the characters didn't need to sound the same and so I deepened my voice on characters like the bin and raised it on the ball of screwed up rubbish. However I did have an issue, it was an annoying habit that I've had since high school and that would be that I tend to stutter or pause at the start of a word and this was something shown in my first few recording attempts using my iPhone. One solution that I took was that I read the script slowly so that I wouldn't stutter in a phrase that I was saying in the lines. Once completed, I transferred them to my computer and dragged the recordings from my iTunes account to the desk top.
This was then imported into After Effects by dragging it into the program composition then I began layering my images and sounds to make them in time with each other. However whilst working on this I discovered there wasn't enough space on the time line for the whole animation and realised the limits of the software as Annabeth had mentioned, at times I did refer to youtube for some tutorial videos in how to layer the layers of the animatic or how to do one. I was at times getting frustrated and even tried different approaches in Photoshop but I decided against it as I wanted to try using After Effects as this would give me an idea of how to do motion stories for my own projects. So I persisted and in the new composition settings I set the time to about 12 minutes since the storyboard of the story was twelve frames long so that in my view meant 12 minutes of animation.
The scenes and music were imported once again and this time I was making astounding progress in arranging the frames and timing of the animatic. One aspect that I did find challenging was placing the key frames of effects such as close up shots of the characters or even the bin rocking at the very end of the animatic. However like most problems there was a work around and for such issues like the argument between the bin and rubbish ball I only did a position transition to the ball of rubbish then in the next scene of the conversation I would have a basic frame of the bin which was imported again from my scene collection. The end scene ended with a close up shot of the rubbish screaming as the bin fell on it then to be replaced for a classic "please stand by" logo and a long beep which I recorded from a Youtube video. With the film completed I cropped the work space to the size of the animatic and like Annabeth told me I went to composition in the tool bar and clicked add to render que. For this process I had taken notes on how to do the rendering process from when I did a trial piece using one of my Voltron fan art pieces and I converted the animation codec to H.624 and by clicking render the film began to render.
This did take a while as it was a long film and I was concerned it wouldn't work on my blog but upon rendering and completion I was rather pleased and whilst it took the entire day to complete I persisted , I worked and I had an end outcome to my work. Looking back I would feel that this exercise had given me an inside look to how motion comic animators did their work and what it entailed in order to bring the graphic work of others to life to give it personality. I still required some practice though but this animatic was the first few steps on my path to motion story animation, which I felt was another area of animation I could specialise in.
In conclusion I enjoyed the activity and was grateful to learn that the teachings from Annabeth had paid off and the lesson on this particular subject I would do the animated title in due course but for now I was eager to know the feedback that I would get from my group and fellow classmates on the Facebook group chat and in lessons to come.
These were then imported one by one into After effects and then I began recording sounds and dialogue for the characters. Being a good character impersonator I did know that the characters didn't need to sound the same and so I deepened my voice on characters like the bin and raised it on the ball of screwed up rubbish. However I did have an issue, it was an annoying habit that I've had since high school and that would be that I tend to stutter or pause at the start of a word and this was something shown in my first few recording attempts using my iPhone. One solution that I took was that I read the script slowly so that I wouldn't stutter in a phrase that I was saying in the lines. Once completed, I transferred them to my computer and dragged the recordings from my iTunes account to the desk top.
This was then imported into After Effects by dragging it into the program composition then I began layering my images and sounds to make them in time with each other. However whilst working on this I discovered there wasn't enough space on the time line for the whole animation and realised the limits of the software as Annabeth had mentioned, at times I did refer to youtube for some tutorial videos in how to layer the layers of the animatic or how to do one. I was at times getting frustrated and even tried different approaches in Photoshop but I decided against it as I wanted to try using After Effects as this would give me an idea of how to do motion stories for my own projects. So I persisted and in the new composition settings I set the time to about 12 minutes since the storyboard of the story was twelve frames long so that in my view meant 12 minutes of animation.
The scenes and music were imported once again and this time I was making astounding progress in arranging the frames and timing of the animatic. One aspect that I did find challenging was placing the key frames of effects such as close up shots of the characters or even the bin rocking at the very end of the animatic. However like most problems there was a work around and for such issues like the argument between the bin and rubbish ball I only did a position transition to the ball of rubbish then in the next scene of the conversation I would have a basic frame of the bin which was imported again from my scene collection. The end scene ended with a close up shot of the rubbish screaming as the bin fell on it then to be replaced for a classic "please stand by" logo and a long beep which I recorded from a Youtube video. With the film completed I cropped the work space to the size of the animatic and like Annabeth told me I went to composition in the tool bar and clicked add to render que. For this process I had taken notes on how to do the rendering process from when I did a trial piece using one of my Voltron fan art pieces and I converted the animation codec to H.624 and by clicking render the film began to render.
This did take a while as it was a long film and I was concerned it wouldn't work on my blog but upon rendering and completion I was rather pleased and whilst it took the entire day to complete I persisted , I worked and I had an end outcome to my work. Looking back I would feel that this exercise had given me an inside look to how motion comic animators did their work and what it entailed in order to bring the graphic work of others to life to give it personality. I still required some practice though but this animatic was the first few steps on my path to motion story animation, which I felt was another area of animation I could specialise in.
In conclusion I enjoyed the activity and was grateful to learn that the teachings from Annabeth had paid off and the lesson on this particular subject I would do the animated title in due course but for now I was eager to know the feedback that I would get from my group and fellow classmates on the Facebook group chat and in lessons to come.
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