495 Animation blog

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...