Leraning ToonBoom

Near the start of September I saw someone on twitch called Gildedguy and he was using a program called Adobe flash which looked very good and never easy to use, I looked into it and a program called ToonBoom is the same but with better features and there was more and more big companies recently switching to ToonBoom because for how good it is.    

I wanted to learn this program but with uni and other projects I was afraid that I wouldn't get the time to, so I did the only thing I could; dive right in head first and do my uni projects in ToonBoom to force myself to learn it.

The interface it actual very easy to use but I hear a lot of people online say that it's very hard; so it's probable just a animation learning curve that I was fortunate enough to be used to animation interfaces.

The other thing I really liked about ToonBoom  was the how you could set so many different
thing to a shortcut and you can set a short cut to be anything such as (ctrl+shift+alt+A) which adobe and others don't let you do.
Here is the ones I use for my tablet. (S4 is not in use yet)


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               This is a test animation I did to learn the                      basics of animating

This here is what I'm working on next but I'm not sure what the final outcome is going to be yet.

Nick's last class

For our last class we did a group project were we picked one of three words and made it into a big 10 by 3 poster with A3 sheets of paper.

This we great fun and a good way to end the year.

Video Here

Drawing for a client (side project)

This is the second project that I did with Motion Go and this one we actual finished.

Sera was asked by the owner of Calder Graphics which is a store in Huddersfield if our group were interested in doing a project for his store.

We got straight onto planing and we decided all to do a 10 second stop motion using things from the store, after this we planed a meeting with the owner and he approved it and suggested we all use a different brand each so that we could use send them to the companies for them to use as well.

After the feedback we meet up the following week to finish planing and to get any things we needed from the store before we go to shot the stop motions.


I had five days till the shot and I needed to do a lot of pre production to do for mine as I had very big plans and looking back on it now I had way to big of plains for the little time I had.

I ended up not having half as much as I wanted to have done after putting in about 30 hours into it, this was ok though as we found a way to use what I had to still do stuff.

The one thing I did not plan on was Sera loving the fact that I had recorded all of my work that I put into the book that I was using from the store, Sera thought it would look cool if it was speed it up too be 7 seconds long. It turns out that it was as easy as hitting the speed up button on an adobe programme as you can (for some weird reason) only speed something by 10.000% which was just not enough, I ended up just exporting it like that and than speeding it up again. Sera and the client liked it that much that we just it in the final output and give the other one to him as well that I filmed.

Here is the final group project  
https://vimeo.com/211733156


And here is the other one I did
https://vimeo.com/215282859

End of year 2 showreel

We made a showreel that have most of the work I've at uni, I wanted the start to be very eye catching to the point where it was almost announcing, I lecturer refereed me to some old openings from news stations which did the same which was funny to see that it was a thing.

Chick Here for the showreel

3D modelling drinks containers

As simple as importing a line from illustrator and extruding it in a 360 degree radius which we did for the can and the bottle. The main thing I liked about this task was learning that there are detailed models and textures inside of C4D that are free to use.

The centipede game using coding (side Project)

I made a game with coding which took two days and boy do I now hate brackets { }. This was my second time using coding to make something and first time writing the code from scratch.

It's called "Centipede" and it's not finished in a way of a full playable game would be but you can still kill things, move around and get a score; you just can't die.

This is the what it looks like and Click Here for a video of it.
If you want to play it for your self than download open processing for free and than the project file Here.

I was messing about and thought it would be funny to turn everything into mushrooms; the enemy will never see me coming :)

New Script for Hyperrealites

I'm in the production stage of my project and I know what I have to do but I couldn't get started so I wrote a better script so that it would simplify what I needed to do and get me started. I realise that the fight scene at the start can be any length of time and can be about anything so I've decided to do it last so that I can focus on the story.  

I may or may not use SFM "Source Film Making" because I am unsure if it's going to be hard to make/find an arena for the fight to happen in but I know that there are a few out there for SFM and it's not hard to use.

I may change scene 3 to use a different software but for now I'll see how scene 2 comes out which I'll be working on now.

Collaboration with a stranger (Side project)

I found someone on a online chat sever called Dark Eyes and he was interested in starting his own parody series which he would edit different cartoons together and than voice over them to give it a story. I offered my help if there was any small things I could help with and he accepted.

It starred off with me reformat his scripts from unreadable to usable as I learned how to write scripts in college so it wasn't too difficult.

After that he needed to find someone to voice the kid dragon character so I offered to voice because he was not looking for a profession and I had the equipment which was a Olympus digital voice recorder.    
That character had a lot of lines!                

after I sent him my lines he edited the video together and he sent it to me to add any random things I could think of, I asked if he had anything in mind but he did not know what I was capable of so it would of been hard to suggest anything.

For one of them I ended up blur out a part of one of the characters for all of the video and I added random images into a blank book.



For the other I removed small objects such as the leg of tables and hid images in the background.

We worked on three videos in to course of two months but he turned to be very unreliable the more I worked with him.

In the second video everything was fine up until I sent him the final edited video and all he had to do was to upload it, but instead of uploading the one I sent him he uploaded the non edited one and said that I should of "Named" the project file something other than the name he sent me, he than didn't take it down so all my work was for nothing.
After that we Worked on one last video which he needed me to voice two characters and to edit one of hes to sound like a robot. After I recorded all my lines and learned how to make a voice sound like a robot in adobe Audion (which I had to like how to use adobe Audion first) he than told me that he was going to sent me his lines "tomorrow". I never got the lines and again wasted my time. I talked to him a month later and he said "oh yea I have been gaming a lot lately".

Although things did not work out in the end I have learned how to treat people who are not interested in what there doing, I also learned a few tricks here and there on how to do thing quicker so I was glad of the opportunity.  

A train to no where (Side project)

This is a Motion Go group project with four others people; well seven if you count the guy who made the music, the one who we took the script off of and are group leader Sera.

We wanted to make an animation that used all of are talents of animation together in one. We started off great by planing, discussing and all around having high hopes for everything that we were doing, we all had great ideas and we were combining them perfectly with each others.

After a few weeks of one a week meeting up for planing; we went out to film places, people and trains in Manchester to use as background footage to rotoscope over, the day went off great and we got everything and more that we needed.

when we got back the next week to meet up we organised the whole project in to scenes as such

The following week everyone had started there scenes and it was going great; Sera even made us a posters and put  them up around the campus.

At this stage of the project we were all doing great but are deadlines for a uni project were coming up and we needed to focus on it so decided to take meet up after the deadline to continue but by that stage we had lost most of the motivation for the project and we had a client that wanted us to do a project for there store so we put it on hold for a while.

The project has been on hold ever since and were meeting shortly to decide if it well be finished at all or to leave it and call it a proposal for one so that we can us it on our CV's.

Here is the recordings of the work I've done so far, unfortunately two out of six of these got corrupted and the last one is half way corrupt so it flashes weirdly for some reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5raNU27yiXk&feature=youtu.be

Sara: Data about myself

For this we were making charts and images that would go with pretty much any information, I already knew most of the stuff but I found that way we hind the two line at the start very useful and I'll be using it a lot in the future. 

Sara: The north of England

In this class we learned how to make transition between two levels of drawings.

Jay: 3D Logo

We made a 3D logo in C4D using adobe Illustrator.

Nick: Letters and ways to do them

We got given a letter and told to design it to be cut out. After the first attempt I got more of a hang of what I wanted to do, for the "o" I cut different sizes and lightly painted each one more as I got closer to the middle.

Nick: A picture and a word

For this we cut out and an image that we make; painted over it on to a page to show the image and than did the same with the text but on the same page.

Brain storm for the Hyperrealities brief

Just finished the brain storm for the hyperrealities brief just to get a clear understanding on what I'm most likely going for as a start to think about concepts and ideas. 

You may notice that memes is a sub category of millennials; that's because I feel that memes are more of a millennial thing than anything else, I could go down the route of the beginning of memes and maybe even what they could represent to non millennials but I'm rather focus on where all the information is instead of digging to find stuff that might not be documented sure as what was the first meme or trying to understand it from someone else's point for view.

I one thing that I linked memes with that needs a bit of explaining is "fire". I used fire because they bought have a lot in common; for example, when the Harambe meme was released "Dicks out for Harambe" it started off a small bit popular, but when someone from the zoo saw it they asked everyone to stop! This added fuel to the fire and the meme went viral, there was nothing they could do other than making it worse.

Just like fire memes can spread every quickly and can hurt people in the process, once big enough it's best to wait until the fire runs out of air and everyone is board of it.

My favourite one so far has got to be "Daydreaming" simply because I do it all the time to escape from reality and think as it helps me to think of ideas and other ways if doing things.

My next stage of action is to pick a few of they words from the brain storm and than by doing research to find a better understanding of what they are and how other people feel about them; I'll be able to have an idea or two for the project. 

  

Hyperrealities Brief

I've just finished my break down of the Hyperrealities  brief and it is going to be a lot of work.

I have a few concepts but nothings set in stone. I am going to do my brain storm now to make sure I cover all areas, at least the ones that I am most interested in and go from there.

It's clear that this brief is our to control and to do with as we please. It's going to be a good change of pace and hopefully fun to. 

Live Brief storyboards done

I finally got down to finishing the storyboards for the live brief "more than a pill"
With all the feedback I got from the polished first 2 seconds I had a clear mind for what to do. I added a object that goes though most scenes to try and that I made the whole thing myself, there is still going to be a few different types of animation but it's only going be a few so that I don't any just for the sake of it.

The storyboards are very rough but I started to make them digital so that I may be able to start them digital in my next projects. My main goal for this project was to send it off to the RSA and I still might; but I now want to make my goal to be able to make a fully formed animatic. This would be very very useful for any future project alone or with a team for people.
I also have another goal that I'm doing very well on overall, it's documenting my work so that I can have time lapse's of all my work.