I have to be honest lads, that IDI project was tough. After doing the research and the storyboard in the first two weeks, I was looking forward to getting down to the actual animation. I had two ideas for the animation and I was confident that I would have enough time to create both of them and have the option to submit either one. As it turned out I ended up being under severe pressure just to get one finished in time. The main reason for this is my inexperience. I chose to animate in Adobe Flash and it proved to be a lot harder than I thought it would. Having spent over two days getting a walk cycle correct - using the bone tool - I realised with two days left, that this walking motion was only applied to the characters legs. This meant that he could only walk on one spot. This is fine when you can move the background, to give the impression of the character moving, but if there's another character in the same scene, he or she moves with the background. So I had to create another walk cycle for the character involving the whole body moving. There were also problems with importing a motion clip into a new file. I spent days on that too. Thanks to Dave, who sorted the problem in minutes. Though by then I was under pressure for time. I suppose one thing I learned from the experience was that I need to be more proficient in a method before I commit myself to using it. I also need to organise my time better. I spent a lot of time in Photoshop preparing the various body parts that I used to compose the characters, and there was a lot of them. When I get a chance I think I'll build up a library of various body parts that I can use over in different projects.
I've uploaded the storyboard I used in the animation. Another thing I learned the hard way was that I never factored in the time properly. Our brief was for a 12 second animation but by the time I had finished and edited mine it was 23 seconds long. I did know before I started that it would run over a bit, and have to be trimmed down, but I ended up cutting big chunks from it to get it down to 12 seconds. Anyway the storyboard below will give the gist of it.

 

The opening scene sees a caveman on his way home after a hard day at the office (hunting). As you can see he's giving the wife a lift home. Surprisingly, for a woman, she's talking incessantly. This is intrinsic to the plot.

 

 

He stops and groans when he realises how far he is from their cave.

 

 

A banging noise to his left attracts his attention.

 

Another caveman is busy carving a stone into a circular shape. He's dreaming of building a cart. An early designer?

 

The first caveman has a bright idea

 

He trades his kill for a stone circle. Is he thinking of building a cart too?

 

 

No, it seems like he has another idea.

 

It's got potential.

 

 

The category

 

I've uploaded the original and trimmed versions of the animation, just to show how important getting

 the duration right is.

 

 

The original 23 second version

 

 

The 12 second version

 

I've looked at everyone else's animations on dropbox and I have to say they're all very impressive. Well done guys. 

 

I was surprised at the amount of time the editing took. I tried to use Adobe After effects first but for some reason the audio wasn't importing with the video. So instead of adding audio again I chose to use Premier Pro. I've used this before but its not as versatile, luckily enough it did the job and as I was pushed for time I stayed with this programme. My plan was to edit two scenes at a time, in case of disasters, and then bring everything together into one project. Naturally this didn't go to plan as, when I imported the pairs of scenes into the final project, they came in as a folder which, when dragged onto the timeline, separated randomly and had to be re-arranged again.

 

I had thought about hand-drawing this animation at first but I don't have a light-box. I'm definitely going to get one as I'm sure I could have done this quicker, even by drawing each frame. I normally use a window for tracing (at home), but that's confined to weekends now due to it being dark these evenings. I also need a break from this computer before my eyes explode so if it suits our next project I'm going to do stop-motion, maybe claymaytion.. I've been working on a character rig based on those wooden figures that you can pose, for life drawing. I'll put the images on the next post, along with a description of the construction process. I know you can just buy these figures but that can prove expensive if you need more than one. I also have a design, from 'The complete animation course', for a clay figure wire & wood rig, for a figure. I'll put that up too or I can photocopy the pages if anyone wants (AMD2013).