Week 9

For my final week I have been putting the finishing touches to my short animation piece. I found that I worked really hard and well on this project, the fact I only had myself to rely on was both easier and harder at the same time. I find that in this project my work had developed to a higher standard because I was working on my own I had to pick up the pace and create a short story.
Good things:
I found that my modelling had become more detailed and better understanding on how to model better within Maya8, the texture I find that I am making progress with UV mapping in photo shop, than I was on the last project. Also because I found character modelling hard, which was mainly the face I worked on that more than anything because I needed to prove to myself I could so things without the help from others.
Bad things:
I do need to work on character animation, I did try my best to design my two characters but it was let down I believe because my animation was to stiff and that could take away from the movie, but on the other hand making the animation the way I did made my animation appeal to what I was trying to produce and that was having a memory and by have the two characters in a slow and them not moving around so much gave the idea of the characters being in the past or in a dream, so in away the animation could work, but I do want to get better in developing animating character more.

the editing and sound went really well, I only used music to get the element of a love story in a way and by using the editing program I think made the short animation better because I was able to cut up the film and add in black shorts to chop up the film to create time passing.

What I would do again:
If I was to do it again I really want to work on my animation so I think I'll develop characters, a good rig and texture them and to just animation and maybe not create an environment to have more time making it better.

what I have learnt:
I learnt how to model, texture, get better in after effects, character modelling, character texture, character animation and developing a short animation piece that I'm very proud of. The one thing that I mainly learnt was texture characters, I have never done this before and it was a new thing I learnt this year.

what I have achieved:
I achieved what I set out to do and that was to develop two scenes with UV mapping textures along with developing two characters faces, which I wanted to work on and make better. A short animation piece by myself. I am so happy with what I have made, even if it doesn't look good to others I found that I achieved a personal goal.

From my work timetable I made for myself it helped to work out what I needed to do for what days, I did keep to my timetable and did sometimes do more than I should have done for certain weeks but then when problems accrued I was able to sort them out without falling behind.

Week 8

I have been doing the rest of my animation and rendering scenes to see the outcome of my short animation piece, so far I'm liking what I have achieved so far, but my animation needs a lot of work, I'm trying my best to give a good quality design and find that I'm nearly there. My editing and music is going to plan I'm not having any troubles editing and finding the right song to go with my animation.
what I have done is used the duration tool in premiere pro to give the before scenes a slow and joggy pace to hopefully show that its a memory. Also I have some clips blacked out to give the affect of later in the day or future. I notice it a lot because I've been working on it and an audience will pick up on it to just not as much as I see it. I am pleased with the work I have done this term, even if there are loads of things that others believe I need to work on I find that I have reached a personal goal, that I can be proud of.

Week 8-music

These are some music video's of the songs I liked for my short animation piece:

Week 7

For week seven I have started to animate my characters, first I have been praticing to animte and trying out how I can make the two skaters move on the ice and interact with each other. If I find some bits in my pratic animated piece that work then I'll keep them and add them to my final scene.

When using premiere pro I started to edit some footage and see how it plays out.

Lighting: I had a hard trouble with the lighting only because I wanted the two scenes to have an element of night and day. Jared said that if I put a light under the snow texture to bring out the look of winter. It has made a difference with both the scene now it has the mood of looking like to sepertate scenes.

Animation: My characters still feel like their not moving smoothly, I need to work on their movement to have them act towards each other. what is working is the kiss scene that I have made. I didn't want to change that scene at all only because I think that it works well. The only thing that is worrying me is that on the maya8 timeline I have not spred out the action which makes the characters move to fast and when playing it in premiere pro, its showing to fast and when I applied the speed tool, it makes the characters jog. But on the other hand the affecet it has given makes it look more of a memory with its joggy slower pace. So I might keep it in or have to re-do.

Music: I wanted to only have a song in the background and no sounds to make it more of an emotional animation instead of the sounds taking the emotion away from the characters. First off I wanted to use the song 'something happened to my heart' from the film Ronnie and Julie but because the film is so old I wasn't able to either find nor download the song so I had to go though a few love songs.

• Boyz To Men: one sweet day


• Jessica Simpson: where you are


• Faith Hill: there you'll be
  
• Brian Adams: everything I do
  

I did go though loads of loves songs and watching the music channel magic, and had a list made but out of the songs I thought might have gone with my animation are shown above. I am thinking of using the song 'where you are' by Jessica Simpson because the slow and sad pace I think connects with my animation more.

Week 6_Blend shapes_movie_clip

Week 6

For this week I was sorting out my texturing on both my characters and without realising I had to redo the blend shapes for both the girl and boy characters. I had the blends shapes from preivous work but wasn't able to re-connect them to the character models and was unable to get any help to see if I could fix the problem, so I had to re-build the blend shapes once again, but to be honest I think the faces were much better than my previouse ones and am glad to have done them again. I also did do as many heads the second time round because when thinking of the story line I added in extra faces when the was really no need.

I am looking at starting my animation tommorrow just sorting out last min adjustments so its all prepared to begin the animation.

Week 5

I have textured my characters over the last few days, it was very hard because a human body is a difficult shape to texture round but the characters are looking really good I will be going back and sorting the textures out to make them perfect on my two characters. below you will see images taken from the maya8 program, that is my screen shots: