495 Animation blog

First, I've fallen behind on my blog posts, so hopefully for the rest of the semester I can keep reporting. So over the past few weeks I have been animating so many scenes. I find that completing animations is a very long and arduous task. It takes precise placement of keyframes and many instance of trial and error. When you place a keyframe with an arm in one position, and then move forward in frames on the timeline and place another keyframe you must watch it back before continuing. Sometimes it's too fast, other times it's too slow or maybe it doesn't look natural so you must try something else or add another keyframe between the two original keyframes. This highlights why animation takes so long to animate. While you may get the positioning of the keyframe exactly right, you must also keyframe other bones (at least in 3D animation) as well which, in an armature consisting of many bones, can take a long time. Not only this, but some of the bones in an inverse kinem...

This week I took a closer look at the Video Editor that I will be using to edit my short film. The Blender Video Sequence Editor is a free video editing program that come bundled with the Blender 3D animation software. In keeping with the theme of the story, becoming a creative being, and the idea of making a film as an example of self reliance, utilizing the Blender VSE is a must. The editor is free, just like the program and I had stated my intention of trying to keep the budget to a minimum. The idea behind this being the hope of inspiring those who don't have the financial means of creating a film to be able to do so by using limited funds. With that said, learning the Blender VSE was an interesting process, particularly learning the shortcuts, the terms that is uses to reference a specific tool and the way in which it renders the edited clips. To experiment with what the VSE could do I took the opening rough clip of my animated short, an opening shot of The Plant and a slow ...

This week, while testing out animating my project by playing around with the animation, has resulted in an interesting detail that I will need to quickly reach a decision on. While setting up a short 1 minute rough animation of my project, I found that the pace of the animation, in order to match what I see when I think of it, is even slower than I thought. Within 1 minute of my animation, the box people, slow and dull in their movements, take a considerable amount of screen time to move about. I animated the emergence of the boxes from their cases as well as the opening of the animation I envisioned. Just these two small events alone took over a minute of screen time.  If this rate was replicated across the entire animation, the what was suppose to be at most 6 minute animation may very well end up being closer to the double digits. This has resulted in a bit of a conundrum as it makes me question whether or not the slow deliberate movements of the boxes are really necessary an...

Over the past week i've been playing around with how I want my scene to be lit and messing with the lighting inside Blender. I want the lighting to be artificial inside the house, with no windows that let the outside be seen, but instead have work lights in the windows creating artificial light. Something I ran into when lighting the scene was using a lamp vs making an object become emissive. In Blender you can create a lamp and by lamp I mean a ball of light that just projects light. It doesn't have a physical form; it can't be seen on camera, it just looks like light is coming from nowhere. On the other hand, creating an object, for example a light bulb, and adding a filament to it that is then turned into an emissive object is the other option. Finding the right intensity of the emission shader is the key to making it look good. I'm still not sure which light i'm going to use or if I will use a hybrid of both. Onto sound, the lack of music in the animation me...

During the break I had time to look at my project some more and while I'm still confident in the thematic aspects of it I wanted to add more variety of colors. The issues that came with this however is with the addition of vibrant colors, it takes away from the aspects of an uncreative, dull and boring lifestyle that my characters live. So I tried to think more on how I could come up with some sort of idea that would support the introduction of color. The conclusion I reached was to look at the idea of the forcing of ideals onto someone to try and get them to conform a standard, a status quo. I came up with the idea of color coding items, particularly using blue for "male" and pink for "female" (they are box people so they don't actually have genders.) These two colors are the stereotypical colors assigned to genders, particularly to children's clothes and toys, not for any specific reason other than that has overtime become the formal color for gender...

The Natural vs The Artificial When doing additionally research for some more ideas on how to better represent the concept I was going for with my animation, the idea of kick starting the creativity of someone, I wanted to see what in addition I could add as a secondary idea. When I thought I’d gotten a good amount of representation of that idea, I next decided to look at the possibility of a spin off theme of artificial vs. natural. The reason I decided this was because of the thought of the basis of creation, which is just the evolution of our natural surroundings. Essentially, I thought about the idea that the first things to be created were not manufactured but just came to be naturally overtime. With that in mind I looked more into the created vs. the manufactured and I believe I have found some additional support to the idea of the boxes vs. wooden mannequins. First, is the idea of making the box people’s appearances more artificial, so I’ve been experiment...