My Final Storyboard for Visual Storytelling
I had heard the phrase storyboard before but I really didn’t know what one was before taking ANI425 Visual Storytelling from professor Devin Bell last winter quarter. Storyboards are the foundational story building tool before beginning a new film. Sometimes they are used to help pitch an idea and other times they are used to flesh out a film after it has been green lighted. In this course we made our storyboards into animatics, short films made storyboard style to give the gist of a film.
For my final in this class I expanded upon previous iterations of the project that I named “Famborted” (Family Aborted). It required a few more drawings to improve story clarity and continuity. The video shows how it all turned out.
The final was a good opportunity to include movement as well. After Effects has a 3D Layers feature that allows for key framed movement of images on multiple layers to help create the illusion of those images seemingly interacting with one another on one layer. In this animatic I use that technique in the sequence where my character slides next to each picture portrait. Those are a series of PNG files on 3D layers. PNG files are used because they have background transparency built in. This makes it easy to mimic 2D objects sliding in front of or behind each other in the way that 3D objects would do.
This is one of those classes I’m putting into immediate use in all my remaining courses as well as my personal projects. Who knows, I might even give it serious consideration as a career specialty. Give me a shout and tell me what you think of my burgeoning storyboarding skills.
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ANI 422 Animation Styles and Techniques Dino Final
For my first final project of the winter 2012 quarter we had the option of doing something new or enhancing a previous project. I wanted to jazz up my dinosaur so I revised that assignment and retooled it as a loose homage to Windsor McCay (Gertie the Dinosaur) and the John and Faith Hubley UPA (my attempt at minimal animation) style.
The white outline with a gray fill pretty much set the stylization I was going for. Modifications included reshaping the head and adding in-betweens for bent leg motion at the beginning. I also added a few dozen extra Photoshop layer neck motion tweens at the end which were imported into After Effects and sequenced for the animation.
The background was stylized with scanned textile pieces. The mountains were a textile scrap with color adjustments to give it a reddish hue in Photoshop. I shaped the rectangular scrap into mountainous contour by creating a mask with the pen tool in After Effects. The ground was a different layer of scanned fabric. I scaled it down to fit under the mountain range. The lake was four alternating scans of a piece of sheer turquoise fabric that I twisted and reshaped on the scanner table. I masked it into the composition with the pen tool and added a wavy effect filter to each layer for stylized wave motion. Here’s how it turned out.
My professor didn’t want us to use Flash for the final and gave the challenge to use other tools so I had to revert to Photoshop. I love Photoshop for textures and images but it is horrible for animation. It took forever to make edits to layer by layer without the benefit of onion skinning which saves massive amounts of time when tweaking. Nevertheless I chugged through it.
Now that I’ve experimented with textiles as environmental accents I really like the feel it gives. I’m definitely going to use them more often in the future. One final down and one to go before spring break.
Read MoreStandard Walk Cycle
This is the standard walk cycle assignment for my 3D Character Animation course. We learned the mechanics of showing weight in the character while making it walk across the screen (as opposed to walking in place which is learned in the first animation course). We downloaded the Generi character, probably the most used animation learning rig, for the assignment.
The objective was to incorporate overlapping action and secondary motion of other body parts to give the digital model actual character.
I created it using Maya 2011 and imported the rendered images into After Effects to create the QuickTime clip.
Read MoreMy Career Change Animated
This is the final modification of my final project from my ANI 201 class, Animation I, at DePaul University in Chicago. It uses images processed in Photoshop and imported into After Effects for compositing. The movie was produced during the fall quarter of the 2009 – 2010 school year.
The concept is to show my career transition in the works. My old life as an engineer in a small engine factory is covered by foliage, ridding me of the old profession that brought me no creative fulfillment. Then the foliage retreats to reveal the inspiration to return to school and unleash my creative juices in digital animation, my new career in progress.
This is the second revision in which I add audio tracks in key spots to give more life to the film. I also added MAYA renderings and hand sketches from my 3D modeling class to the end.
Read MoreParticle Physics Anyone?
This is my final project for ANI480 Animation Production taken during the fall quarter of the 2010-2011 school year at DePaul University. The animation was done in Maya, clips of each of the five segments of the animation were rendered and imported into AfterEffects to create five QuickTimes and those QuickTime clips were imported into PremierPro to compose the movie.
Most of the work was done in Maya. The universe is a sphere with a stellar graphic that I applied to a shader. I then dropped the shader onto the sphere to create my universe where all the natural phenomena occurs.
The star is composed of two spheres which are centered on each other. I manipulated lattice points at the front of the outer orange sphere at different points along the time line to simulate a “belching” or “spitting” effect each time it ejected a particle. I pulled the lattices into the sphere to reveal the inner yellow core of the star and then forward to extend the front of the sphere to a tip as each particle left the core.
Each particle is a sphere that is stretched by a lattice deformer. Alternating the positions of the deformer lattice and the deformer base is what gives it the pulled effect. Alternating these positions is how I created the tail behind each particle. Pulling the sphere away from the lattice as it traveled out into space is what allowed it to reform itself back into a sphere again. This same lattice deformer option was used for the proton-neutron conversion, atom simulation and molecule simulation segments of the film.
The inner and outer star, atom and molecule components were all colored using regular color shaders. The proton-neutron converted particle was uncolored. I left it at its gray default and used a series of lights with green and purple color filters in order to simulate the conversion from one type to the other.
In the last segment I found an image of daVinci’s Virtruvian Man, applied it to a shader and dropped the shader onto a rectangle. Then I deleted the rest of the rectangle faces to end up with a plate showing the image on both sides.
Read MoreAbout The Artist
Martin Lindsey is a Master of Arts animation student at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois and an engineer turned blogger here on The Animated World of Martin Lindsey. I’m blogging with the press corps at the 2012 C2E2 April 13-15.
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