Tuesday 7th January 2014

Cutting the Animation

This was an outcome that I probably should have done earlier. After leaving the animation yesterday I returned to have a fresh look on the significance of this portion of the animation and if I would benefit from using it. In the end I decided to completely cut the first part of the animation and instead focus on getting the animation moving as I haven't actually got anything other than a walk cycle. It was probably a wiser move to remove the beginning scene as I was able to get some animation prepared for screening on the 8th January.

Removing the first scene has caused a slight problem though. The first scene was there as an establishing shot and to provide a smooth transition into the walk cycle. As I was unable to complete this part of the animation I now don't have an establishing shot and either need to create a simple one that I can easily accomplish, or have the animation start without one. Doing either creates its own problem. If I decided to create a new beginning segment it'll take some time to make which will mean I lose time to finish the animation, if I chose to do the latter everyone viewing it just jumps straight into the animation which really doesn't work well.

Continuing the animation

Now I'm not focused on the establishing shot, I managed to get some progress in my animation. Although nothing much really happens, it's enough to screen and get something to write a critical report. So far the cat walks along a street with and sits down in front of a bus stop. The background consists of some houses, all looking exactly the same, with a few difference concerning what is in front each house. There are also hills in the background that received a bit of a tweak from the ones seen in the beginning segment from yesterday. Also the clouds were made and moved across the screen along with the previously mentioned drawings. Each layer moves at a separate speed to each other to give a more realistic walking effect. The houses, wall, trees all move together at a moderate speed and this speed dictates how fast the cat appears to move. All of the houses are on the same layer are tweened across the stage. The first keyframe is at frame 1 and the last is at frame 350. To create this tween I positioned the houses in each key frame and then right clicked on the timeline and selected 'Create Motion Tween'.

The position of the houses in the 1st frame, underneath is the position of the house at the 350th frame.

After doing a similar tween for all of my background I then worked on the clouds in the sky. The clouds were fairly easy to make. All I needed to do was to randomly draw with the paint tool with a couple of shades of grey and then convert to a movie clip. I then added a blur filter and changed the value to 45 px, this gives a steam or cloud effect. I wanted to try something with the clouds and that was to see what exactly would happen if I made the clouds tween in one direction inside the symbol, but tweened the symbol in the opposite direction for the animation. There really was no gain from me doing this as I could of had the clouds moving in one direction for the entire animation, however I wanted to experiment a little bit and see what would happen if I had a tween forcing the clouds to move in an opposite direction. The result is a bit of a glitch. The first time playing the cloud will work fine, it'll move in the opposite direction once the tween has ended, however when continuing to play the loop the cloud will then have a new starting position and when it reaches the end of the tween it'll jump to a different spot to begin going the opposite direction. I'm not surprised it does this but I still wanted to test it a little bit. So I decided to compare the cloud against another cloud, this time without a tween inside the symbol, and see if there was any difference in the speed. To my surprise there was a difference. The first cloud moved at a slower pace compared to the second cloud and also stopped a lot earlier.

Once I had finished experimenting I decided to make a cloud, again with the tween inside the movie clip. It is probably possible to get the same effect without forcing the tweens against each other, but I don't want to waste much more time working it out. The next step after creating my cloud was to duplicate it. I didn't want to use the exact same image for every cloud as there is never two clouds the same, so I would drag the symbol from the library onto the stage and then use the transform tool to alter the image. I did this for every cloud and once I felt I had enough for the sky I tweened them to go along with the background.

 The first image is the original drawing of the cloud. As you can see I only did a few little scribbles with a couple of shades of grey. I then, after converting it into a movie clip, added a blur filter at 45 px to get to the final image. Once it's like that I can copy and paste at will and alter the image by using the transform tool. I can also change the blur, for example I can change it to 95 px for a thinner looking cloud. I can make it thicker by lower the px as well however if I do that I need to avoid putting it too low otherwise the strokes of the brush will become noticeable.