Pencil Test

So, I've been sick the majority of my break, meaning I lost A LOT of time that I could have been animating. And that really sucks. But I did two shots today, and I was working on a run cycle that I needed to test, but I don't have my fancy art computer and nice scanner and awesome art stuff so I had to make due with my 5 year old eMachines (lol) and an ancient scanner that was screaming at me as it protested so many pictures. And, I don't have quicktime or CS4 on this hunk o' junk, so I couldn't time it out. I had to make due with an animated .gif made in photoshop elements 3.0 (wow!). lol ghetto. I think I will have to go back later and add a few more in-betweens here and there, but I must move on to other shots for now:

(click on the image 'cause it's animated. oh, panties! lol.)

New Shots!

So I've been working really hard the past few days and did a ton of shots. Here's just one of them. :D

Cut Extravanganza

I've been having a lot of internal conflict with everything: my film, my classes, my jobs, my lack of time. And, after  just dropping my first class ever to make room for me to animate, I realized, in order to make this film more efficient and able to be finished on time, I will have to cut some things out.

So... next week, I will adding my updated animatic. There might  be one or two things added to make the film make more sense, but there will be a few shots that will definitely be cut. Other shots might be on the edge and have a note on then that means if I can't finish it in time, that shot is cut. It's really annoying for me to do that. But I am only one person. One person on one film. Doing everything. By myself. It's time consuming and hard. Not to mention I have other classes and juggling two jobs. I just don't have that much time. My entire two-week vacation will consist of animating for my film.  There will be no time for friends or family. I will be consumed with my work.

Thus, this stress that I was afraid would overcome me and cause me to  physically get sick as I have seen so many times in the past few years with my friends, it's caused me to take precautions. My health before my work. My film before my jobs. My jobs before my general eds. I will stick to this. But no matter what, my well-being comes first, and my work will suffer if I get sick.

So yep. An emotional update for my film status.

Almost Done with it...

So this is almost finished, but all I need to do now is create a BG for when the window blobs and mask over the original so that it actually looks like the window is the blob and not sitting still in the BG. But that's an easy tweak which I will save for later because I really must go back and continue animating all the other ridiculous shots I have to do. :|

Traditional animation is really time-consuming for a 20 week production where I only have like 10 weeks to animate it all. Sad face.

Shot 14 Test- needs work

Things I need to fix:

-The hair that disappears then pops back in when she rotates her head
-The sudden arm pops/running/jumping sequence in general
-The timing (which would be done in after effects anyway)

Tell me what you think. I don't have time to make the most extreme changes because I have so many shots to do. But if it's an easy fix, I can do it. Also, if the running sequence isn't that noticeably bad to you, tell me so I don't have to waste my time making it perfect. :)

Shot 18

Bask in my utter joy that I have at least something to show at screenings now. lol.

Ok... compositing was pretty mindless. I think I can trust some underclassmen to help me with that. I NEED them to help me. Else I will fail all my other classes and not sleep. :)

Keyframe Test Shot 18

So here's what I was working on. Last night I did all the in-betweens and inking and scanned it today. So I will be compositing it tonight and putting up a finished shot of it maybe tomorrow.

The movement in this one is probably one of the "harder" ones, but definitely not the hardest of my shots. It just took a while trying to get the movement, the turn, the secondary motion all in there. It was just a bit more time consuming than other things I have to do. Hopefully, I can spit out close-ups and quick movement rather quickly to keep on schedule.

Animatic

I'm totally just going to post my animatic and maybe some other stuff now because I'm almost done with some pencil tests and I want to finish this adorable shot because it's going to be so cool but it's going to take me the rest of the night. It's worth it. In the end, it's totally worth the lack of sleep. <3

So my animatic is not exactly what it will be in the end. Things were cut out, things were added, and there might be more shots added for comprehension and story purposes, only if I have the time to do that. 

But I really need people to help me with in-betweening and inking who are good at drawing. Mostly just inking. I don't trust people in-betweening for me. I actually don't trust people inking for me, either, but I really need help because it's a lot to do by myself. It's a long film for ten more weeks, and it'll be very time consuming for me, so I think I need to stop making films completely by myself now and try asking for help. I'm just too stubborn! Argh, how frustrating.

Follow My 2-Quarter Animation

I probably should have made this blog at the beginning of the year to show the progress of my project as I went along. However, I didn't think of that at the time. So, I will pretend that I did and will slowly feed you information, concept art, animatics, shot tests, etc... to let you follow my process of creating a short animation in a period of 20 weeks, from scratch.

My animation is a 2D, traditional/digital mix in black and white about a little girl's nightmarish dream. However, I have yet to decide on a title, so if you want to help me, don't be afraid to leave some comments.

Here's the character design of the little girl:

I will continue to post things in the next few days, so stay tuned for the next exciting addition to this Untitled production!