72 Hours of Animation.

Leah C.

June 7, 2010 - 5:00 PM

I have to admit, I should've started my animation two weeks ago. Unfortunately, I waited till the last minute and found myself glued to the front of my computer for the past two days. My last final project for "Intro to Animation" was very open, just as long as it was a narrative piece. Today during the last critique, there were many different directions that people took. Still shots, film, Photoshop, and Flash were the main techniques used to collaborate the final piece.

My narrative was very simple, I wanted to make a piece about bunnies. I played with the idea of bunnies multiplying, and taking over a city. My animation was short, and did not get to include scenes of how the bunnies took over the city. Instead I suggested the outcome by flashing newspaper headlines, which were quite vague now that I think about it....I guess that's as creative as I can get at 5 in the morning.

I uploaded my file to my New Grounds account, please check it out. I kept it as a swf file, and was unable to export the video to a mov. file for youtube. After the video finishes, it loops again, overriding the music. I forgot to make a start and stop button for the animation so you can just close the browser when the clip starts replaying.

Check it out here! (about 1minute long)

I decided to do a Flash animation, for the final. The only other time I used Adobe Flash was for ARTD 252, "Interactive Digital Arts." I took that class last year with John Park, and learned a lot, but for some reason I found myself lost. I had to relearn the basics, since I don't use the software very often. Flash is such a long process, that really requires much patience. Each frame needs to be drawn to create a desired movement. There are also other ways to achieve simpler movements, such as key framing, but I found myself drawing most of the time to achieve a desired movement. I used a Wacom tablet, to draw out my animation, a tool that all digital artist should invest in. This tablet hooks up to my computer, and with the Wacom pen, I can easily make strokes with much more ease and control than I would with a mouse. These tablets are pretty affordable, I think one can get a small and simple tablet for about 70 bucks now. The school also supplies tablets for students to use and rent, but having your own is so much convenient and well worth the investment.