Monthly Archive for August, 2008

We finished watching the rest of Persepolis in the morning class today. It was good. Then we spent the rest of class time working on our comics. The first image up there is the third page, and it was actually something I did yesterday (because it was our weekend homework to do a third page). I drew another two pages in class, and I really like the fifth page (which is the third one up there) for some reason. Probably because the random enemy pirate character that I just made up on the spot actually turned out pretty nicely. And we have Unnamed Character from a different angle; an angle which I don’t think I’ve ever done before. The fourth image up there is actually from the afternoon class. It was from a drawing activity where we each got a different set of cards (one was a mouth, one was a set of eyes) and we had to draw our characters with that face. These aren’t really faces I use very often (or at all), so they sort of look weird.

I made this yesterday when I was bored. The cat’s running animation isn’t really that great, because I had a hard time visualizing how its running animation would look like due to its short legs. Other than that, I think it turned out nicely, especially for something I just decided to do for no reason.

And here’s what we did in the afternoon animation class today. We made animatics, which are basically like storyboards with the pictures put on an timeline. After setting up a few important keyframes, we went and animated some of the stuff in between them, which you can see in the example above. All of our animations share a common theme, which is to have a mouse enter at the beginning and exit at the end.

My story basically goes like this: there’s a cat chasing a mouse, and they run up a tree. Unnamed Character is like “oh noes” when she sees the cat in the tree, so she goes into an imagination sequence where she tries to save the cat but is stopped by a government agent for whatever reason. The agent shoots at Unnamed Character, and she does a matrix dodge and flies into the tree and saves the cat. Then the mouse exits. It’s clearly not done yet, but I guess I’ll be posting what I have at the end of each day.

Today in the morning class, we had a guest speaker who talked to us about some important plot elements: antagonists, inciting incidents, resolutions, and guiding ideas. It was interesting because I never really consider these things when I make daily flashes; I just make them. I kinda find it easier to just make them without thinking of these things, but that’s probably more suited for things that are made quickly and often, as opposed to longer works that take a lot more time to make. Then we got to work on our comics and stuff. I redrew the first page so Unnamed Character is at school instead of on a random street.

In the afternoon class, we worked on some morphs. I did CatBread, and when I finished, I made UnnamedBox. Then we learned about squash and stretch! We spent the last few minutes animating something jumping, so I made a jumping cat. I don’t know why I keep drawing cats.