I Broke My Bone Today

No, not a real bone, but a fake one. Today I tried out making a chicken leg out of Premo for 'The Hole', but it didn't work out too good. I was really testing out a new way of baking clay things so that they wouldn't get scorched like they had in the past. I did this by placing the item in a pile of cornstarch in a foil box which then went into my toaster oven. After I baked the perfect bone, however(I baked the bone then applied the meat), I accidentally cracked it while trying to clean it off and give it a little sheen by rubbing it. I applied the meat to the bone afterwords and then baked that. When I took that out I found that the meat had cracked and the bone broke completely. It would probably be salvageable, at least the bone part, but the meat isn't looking quite as I would like it to and I may give it another go later on. At least I know that baking it cornstarch works pretty well. I'll still need to test the original Sculpey in it though because that's the clay that burnt or turned purple all the time for me.

Website Work

Well, I did a 30 minute go at designing a new blog/website the other day and have got a lot done since. I started with sketching out ideas, what I wanted and what I liked, then moved onto the computer. Since then I've spent so much more time on it. I really trying to get it so that it looks good and professional. I don't want to add all these bells and whistles to it, but rather make it functional, full of information, but also looks good. I've been learning a few things from my Graphic Design class and the number of tutorials on the web and I see that the point of the design should not to be to look pretty but to rather enhance the user's experience. So that I'm trying to do, going through every little bit slowly tweaking it to my liking. I've also looked over a number of well designed blogs to get ideas of what my things should look like. Hopefully I'll be able to get the blog to something that I think works and that I like sometime soon and then I'll be able to start thinking more about the main site. I've done some sketches and things about it, but haven't come up with anything final.

I need to really start working on "The Hole" some more too, but I've realized that I think that the site is more important than getting that done. I've already spent more time over a longer period of time on the site and I would like to get it done and finished so that people can enjoy it. If I get around to it and don't have too much homework, I'll try to balance out my site and claymation times.

A Little More Work Done

This past week I got a tiny bit of work done on "The Hole" animatic. I pretty much finished up section 1 of 10. If I really pushed myself and stopped wasting time on doing other things, I would probably be able to finish the whole thing in two or three weeks, even with school going on. I really need to try hard to get things finished soon so that I'll be able to finish this thing before going off to college.

I also think about the website every few days and how I wish that I could get it done. It will take lots of work just finding and compiling the new stuff I want to put on it and the design is not even done yet. Some how, I'll have to also convert all my tutorials in to html/css format which is not an easy task since I don't know css, there are quite a few to get done, and I'm not sure if I'd have to completely redesign them or if I could use the same basic layout as the image files for the web. To anybody out there reading this, don't design your tutorials as an image file if you're going to put it on the web. You'll end up having to do twice the work if you want to convert it to html. Recently, I've been thinking about a new blog design. I've been subscribing to different blogs to get ideas on how to make it better and as a result, I've decided that the current design is not good enough for my standards. Although it looks okay, it's not very professional or original looking. With the new design, I'll have to tie it into the new site design somehow, I'm still not sure if I want it to look a little different or not. I'll also probably be chaning over to Wordpress eventually because I think you can do things more to your liking with it. I haven't come up with anything solid yet, hopefully I will soon.

Too much stuff needs to be done. I need to set up a schedule or something for myself where I work on each of these for at least 30 mins a day or something if I want to finish them soon.

Finished Sculpt, The Hole Preplanning

Today I pretty much finished the sculpt. I decided to use some beads I had for the eyes instead of baking some. I'll have to get some pictures up later. I'm also beginning planning for the animatic for The Hole. I started it before, but I realized that I wasn't being very organized so I'm going to redo it, starting in a more organized manner. I'll have to force myself to do it sometime since redoing stuff isn't very much fun.

Camera Mapped Test for The Hole

I don't usually like posting too much in one day, but I'm going to anyways since this is related to the last post. I was actually working on it while writing the last one and had to let it render and upload later. Anyways, this is a test for something that I may try for "The Hole". Basically, it gives me the opportunity to do a more extreme camera move in the world of animation where you would normally have to use a motion control rig. In this test, I used a miniature(didn't have enough clay sitting around to make a large one) version of the character, set it on a table, and took a picture. Then on the computer, I edited the picture so that the background would be flat and so that there would be a hole in the table. After that was done, I went though the process of camera mapping it. Normally I would not try this for an animation, but in this case it is more easily done because of the simple shapes of the set and character(everything has to roughly be modeled in CG, complicated stuff would take forever). After doing it once, I have an idea of how I could probably make it better, but won't share all the details now(those will either come much later on the blog or in a short book on the making of "The Hole"). Here's the video. Keep in mind that it is a test, so it wasn't done to my best ability.

Another Animation Test

I was gone for a few days so there wasn't much posting going on, but now that I'm back, here's some more. This morning I did another short animation test. Now, I'm really trying to practice timing and different animation techniques like easing in and out. I think that these things really do help as this looks a lot better than some of the not-so-good stuff I was pulling out a couple years ago. It's still not the best, but it's a start. This time I shot a clip of a blue man clapping, again on the Sony S60, but this time at 24fps. What's nice about not worrying about camera quality and features of the character is that you can really concentrate on animation and timing. I'll have to come up with a few more exercises for myself to really get this stuff down, it'll be good practice for "The Hole" too. Speaking of "The Hole", I bought myself a board to use as the set while I was away. I'm hoping that it won't be too narrow, but if it is, I'll just get another one. Next for that will be to paint it and to build a base for it. Still got to finish that animatic though. Here's the video:



The clap part is a little slow, but I think I realized that I was doing that during the actual animation process. Next time, I'll try to make sure to stay with the number of frames planned.

EDIT:
I edited the video by taking some frames out of the clap section as Ryan suggested and it looks better. Here's the result:

More Video Work

Today I did a lot of work with the videos; I edited some and redid others. I also converted them to a .flv format in preparation for the site. The sizes of them will be slightly(you can hardly tell) larger than they are now, but hopefully the quality will be a little better. Click on the image above to view them larger. I still have to do a few more, but I have to find the images somewhere in my masses of files if they still exist. If they no longer exist on the computer, I probably have a burned copy of them somewhere.

As for the animatic, I hope to do some kind of animating marathon or something so that I can get it finished up during summer break. I doubt that I'll have tons of time once school starts. I may try to animate maybe 1-2 hours a day if I can get myself to. If you want to see a little of how it looks, I've included a short test clip that I did below. Sorry for the quality, I compressed it a little too much. Depending on the render times, I may cut down on a few amenities(reflections, motion blur, ect.) to speed up progress.

Finished Story Boarding

I finished storyboarding today for "The Hole", just to let you know. They aren't the best because I had some trouble trying to think in 3D space so a lot of the shots are from the same exact angle. While that isn't too terribly bad(some consistency is good), it can make it more boring if too many are the same shot. That's partially why I'm going to make the CG animatic. I'll be able to more easily visualize it in 3D space and mess around with the camera and stuff. A lot of animatics are made from the storyboards directly, and things are cut out and stuff, but I figured that this would give me a chance to use my 3D skills and it would probably be easier to do anyways. With the animatic, I'll also get a good idea of timing(very important as timing is one thing I'm aiming to work on in this project, I still am not sure how long the final thing will be) and I'll be able to get some sound effects in so that I can save time or look for the early, before the actual thing is finished and animated. The story boards also weren't annotated, partially because the template I had didn't have spots for them, but also because the script is pretty much annotating it for me.

I got 91 squares done if you were interested in that. I probably could've put more in, but I didn't since I'm doing an animatic. I don't think I'll show this stuff yet, I'm thinking about making a little "making of" thing at the end of everything and don't want to give out everything just yet or it wont be interesting.

This thing is coming along at a nice pace, hopefully I'll be able to keep it after I move.

More Work on The Hole

I did some storyboarding for "The Hole" the last couple of days. There still is some more to do, but once that is done, I can pretty much get onto the animatic. Here's a video for you, a test I found on the computer that I did for "The Hole" probably over a year ago now. It was just testing to see how some things could work.

Cell Phone

A few days ago I made a cellphone for a prop for the short I'm going to make. I know I haven't done the script and everything, but I felt like making something, and I was pretty sure that I would be using a cellphone in the story. I can always change it if I don't like it or it's too small or big or something.

Concept Sketching and Tutorial

Today and yesterday I've done a number of concept sketches for "The Hole". The things that I'm sketching may not even be used, but whatever, it's part of the movie making process. I still need to come up with a pretty solid script sometime so that I can storyboard it. That'll let me then do the CG animatic and all the pre-visualization will be done. After that I can start making final props, get the set made, light it, and shoot away. I'll probably have to throw in some animation practices in there so that I can actually animate somewhat decently. A lot of pre-planning will also have to be done for timing and where I'll be using wire to hold things up and stuff. Lots of work, but lots of fun.

For the tutorial, I finished it yesterday, only to learn later that the audio wasn't synced up correctly. It's not too big of a problem, but makes the tutorial look strange in some spots. Hopefully I can figure out how to fix it. Once that's done, I can figure out a release date or something.

Sorry for not posting any learning or interesting stop motion material recently. I'll have to do that soon so that the blog doesn't focus just on my updates.