animating

Sally facial expressions

To help with rigging sally and as we didn't know how dan was going to do facial rigging i drew out some facial expressions to show what we need her to do. I did find this challenging at times as sally can look very scary and evil instead of looking cute and friendly which is a slight problem as the animation is for kids. The ticked facial expressions are the ones that i found worked well. However in the end dan has managed to make it so that we can move each part of the face individually so this will be a lot easier when animating sally as we can then exaggerate expressions a lot easier. 

jack in a box test

I also animated a short test of the jack in a box rigged by Dan to see if everything was working alright and to show at our first production meeting. It helped to see what adjustments we needed to tell Dan to make.

2nd week, 4th blockthro, Setting up the Scene

This is the final blockthro!! yay! for this me and jenny got together and thought about everyones comments and put together what we thought would work. There are still adjustments that will be made with the final animation compared to this as we still need to work on the pacing but for now we are happy to continue on to start animating =D

To be able to start animating we also had to set up the scene and make sure all the props were referenced in. I set up the workshop and here are some images.

3rd blockthro

This is our 3rd attempt which we showed at our first production meeting of the term. Derek suggested to us that we added some camera moves however we didn't completely understand what Derek was trying to suggest so ended up going a bit overboard with the camera moves and this was noticeable to other people. So we would have to adjust this also there are times where the shots do not flow into the next. Such as frankie is standing up and then suddenly magically sitting down so we would have to show him moving to this. However it was nice to see that they understood the story from the blockthro which is great. We then had a meeting with Rosa to make sure that everything was on track and that we were organised and so far so good =D

2nd blockthro

This is the second blockthro which we then showed to Derek who pointed out that we crossed the line in numerous places. Some of the shots were not working and some things didn't make sense in the blockthro. We also needed to make the pace of the animation quicker. So we again adjusted the blockthro.

Christmas, 1st blockthro, Dissertation

Over christmas me and jenny worked on putting together the blockthro so that we could get ready to animate when we got back. This is the first attempt of the blockthro. We realised that we needed to cut it down a lot as it was just under 7 minutes but we could see that a lot of the shots could be a lot quicker so wasn't too worried. We first had georg have a look at it and he cut out a lot of the shots so after talking with him we then adjusted the blockthro.

I have to say i really enjoyed animating the scene where sally is under the floorboards playing with the spindle of thread as in this scene i focused on her movements more. I really enjoyed animating her movements as it is very different to what i have animated before and am looking forward to animating the real sally =D

Dissertation

Over christmas i have also been focusing on my Dissertation and got around 9,500 words down however i haven't properly read it all through yet as i was panicking on getting it done. So now i will have to go through each section and make adjustments where i need to.

Blockthro