2017 Reflection

I worked on quite a few things during the first quarter of this school year, as evidenced by this video to the left. Five of these projects are worth writing a paragraph each.

FISH MODEL RIG

        The first thing I did in actual animation software this year (around 2 weeks of our time were spent waiting for animation software to be fixed on our macs) was model and rig a fish. Pictured to the right and in the recap video above, this fish was to be a rigged 3D model, in contrast to all of our previous work. While I didn't have too much trouble, I forgot how bad I was at 3D modeling. Painting joints was a real pain in my side, and troubleshooting was a pain in my everywhere. If I could change anything, I'd go for a more standard fish; my original drawing was kind of weird. 

THE KATYDID

        The beginning of my misadventures in finding a project to do was the Neoberrettia Spinosa, or Great Arid Land Katydid. Shown in "Mantis Example" below, the Great Arid Land Katydid has an interesting manner of moving. After a few iterations and some brainstorming, I decided I wanted to do some stuff that was WAY out of scope for my time frame and capabilities. Instead of doing the project, I messed around a while. All that remains of this are a few test drawings. If I could change anything, I'd focus on this instead of getting sidetracked attempting to create other things.

360 DEGREE MAN

       360 Degree man started as a little side project. I believe my excuse at the time was, "I should probably figure out how to rig stuff in after effects before I try to do something so ambitious," but that was mostly an excuse. I'm proud of this one, I guess, but my focus should probably have been elsewhere. I relearned a bit of rigging with After Effects from this project, figured out how to make walk cycles and draw from multiple angles. Regardless, it isn't worth digressing from a project that actually looks nice and requires talent and effort. 

RED LOBSTER LIFE PRESERVATION RIG

        If you don't bleed red lobster, you aren't a real mobster, or so a wise man once told me. This guy's a truly Futurama-esque head in a jar type. The original intent was to create a face to rig for adobe character animator, but it didn't provide the look I was going for, so I decided to turn it into a regular old model in After Effects. His conceptual predecessor was a head in a jar with a fish floating around that me and my friends drew late at night in a Skype call. From this guy, I learned how to build a more complex model than some boring doodle. If I could change anything, I'd just make him a neck-up model and focus more on making him emote. Again, an interesting project, but not as cool or interesting as the katydid.

THE ROLLING ROTOSCOPE

The final project of the year was a rotorscoping (a technique where a short video is traced over to create an animated effect) project. We could do whatever we wanted. Initially, I was too ambitious. Crazy, right? Anyways, the initial video was too blurry, but the second video I took of me rolling on the ground was just right. Shown to the right, the second video was goofy and it didn't take many frames to loop. I ended up using around 21 frames of video, and it still looks relatively smooth. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time to work on the background. If I could do anything different, I'd budget my time better.