Animation work 10th October

    Today I became more acquainted with using Adobe After Effects in the form of some basic animation. I kept it simple and in hindsight I think it would have been better if the squares I used (I could have also made a circle or two) had more colour variation than red. I admit I didn't end up making the animation Simon made during the lesson but my attempt I did try some variations of squashing, stretching, timing, tinting and pathing that on the surface I suppose comes off as rather messy at first glance.

    I tried working with the early mistakeof not having the guiderail in the centre of the shape (why the lower square flies about so wierdly) and the third cube that darts between the two was with a shape that had been appropriately centred using the tool.

    In the afternoon Group 4 was assigned a task of folding up paper and then drawing body parts, with other people drawing the other boy parts so we had no idea what was drawn for say the head when it came to drawing the torso. After that they were laid out and revealed. The group was then divided into two groups and each group had to pick one of the characters drawn. My group picked what appeared ot be a pig-nosed dog with huge biceps and brains with chicken feet for feet, wearing a tank-top and a coat of some kind. Our group's task was to turn a simple character drawn on a sheet of A0 paper into our character. The other group had chosen a shrimp-man with a moustache, biceps, a big head with exposed brains, odd eyes and a single fin for a lower body.

    The charcoal animation became...quickly disturbing although the lecturer had no objection to a transformation clip that included blood, violence and broken bones. We had our dogman literally bursting out of the chick character we were given, and then turning into it. We never quite got the full proportions done as we ran out of time but we managed to apply most of the transformation to the point the original character was almost not there any more by the end. Although I think the other group got the "violence" memo when they had their character flex, explode and leave a brain. It was fun, interesting coming up with ideas and a little unsettling what we ended up making.