Lecture update: 31st October 2014

    This morning's lecture was in regards to making an animation that is designed to show the various layers to an animation or composition made in Maya and photoshop. I started off with a bit of trouble as I neglected to put the camera movement on the null layer but Simon was helpful enough to show me how to use it correctly and to angle my animation correctly as I had the layers moving instead of the a null layer linked to a camera.

    There was also a minor blunder that I had accidentally switched camera 1 to invisible which stumped us for a bit and I felt embarrassed that the "motionless camera" issue was caused by such a simple mistake. We quickly fixed it after discovering it and everything worked correctly after that. I am using three slides from a work-in-progress Maya tutorial instead of a scene as this was all I had on-hand at the time.

    In the afternoon my group made a stopframe animation. At first it was a simple idea of Brem lifting up his coat the throwing it down after his head became a wraith mask. We wanted to experiment more so we had the coat being quite literally magic via transformation and peopel emerging out of it like a clown car (my cameo being me "swimming" out then diving behind a ball. It was fun brainstorming ideas and passing them around as to what happens next and some sections worked surprisingly well. Others not so well (We tried to capture the hat in midair but found it impossible to capture it at the right time and when we did, the camera or the software automatically deleted it probably on the pretense of the captured focus being quite blurry) so we never really got great shots of anyone hovering although we tried our best.

    The whole thing goes dark 2/3 of the way through because we had to change the battery and when we put it back in it set itself to a lower light setting. Although it was getting darker outside as the lesson went on.