Assignment for Monday (2/27)

For today's class I want to see your two characters in various "acting" poses. You're not changing the designs of your characters, just the poses. So, pick three emotions or "transient states" (angry, drunk, sad, flirtatious -- whatever you want to choose), and make each of your characters act them out.

If, for example, you choose angry, sad, and nervous, I want to see both of your characters looking angry, sad and nervous. So it will be a total of six drawings. Bonus points if your characters have different poses for the same emotion. For example, a big, macho character might express anger differently than a meek character would. The big character might look threatening, and the meek character might look ridiculous.

By the beginning of class Monday, have a rough storyboard of your two characters acting and reacting to each other. If you don't have a story in mind, perhaps you can use some of your poses as a starting point. You will eventually be making a short animation where your two characters are acting together, and the storyboard will give you a blueprint for this. The drawings can be very sketchy.

An online article on storyboarding, which has some examples I showed in class, is here, if you want to revisit some of the examples:

http://pingmag.jp/2006/10/27/storyboard-design/

And one last detail, left over from the music project: I want everyone to re-work their title screens, to give them more "style," and align them with the style used in the animations themselves. Here's a blog that has screen captures of a ton of movie title screens, if you're looking for inspiration:

The Movie Title Stills Collection

References for Monday's Class

Here are the best tutorials I've been able to dig up on using armatures in Flash CS4. The first is a good intro to the basics, and the six embedded tuts get into the nitty gritty of creating a fully articulated puppet of a person.

"Create a Simple Inverse Kinematics Animation with Flash CS4," by Lee Brimelow, for Layers magazine:

http://www.layersmagazine.com/create-a-simple-inverse-kinematics-animation-with-flash-cs4.html

Matt Maxwell's six-part tutorial:













As I said in class, I find the bone tool a little buggy, but here are some tips that, I've found, make creating a jointed Flash "puppet" a little more effective.



Firstly, as shown in the tutorials above, you need to make an extra symbol at the sternum, which will act as a branching-off point to connect the shoulders and the neck.

This seems to be the best sequence for creating the armature:

1. Start at the waist, connecting the waist to the two hips.

2. Connect the wast to the torso, then the sternum.

3. Finish connecting the legs to the hips.

4. From the sternum, connect the arms, then the neck and head.

Make sure joint rotation is disabled for the two bones going from sternum to shoulder.

Once you start keyframing your puppet, it can be difficult to manipulate the puppet back into a neutral starting point -- when you start copying the armature, you end up copying your whole string of keyframes. For this reason, it's a good idea to save your puppet in a single-frame fla, in a neutral pose, separate from the fla you are creating your animation in. You can cut and paste the neutrally posed armature into various scenes in your animation fla, so that you're not pasting whole layers of keyframe poses that have to be readjusted.

Moving your puppet across the stage, through space, can induce all kinds of buggy distortions. The "cleanest" way to move your character through space is to animate the character moving in one place, then copying and pasting that animated armature into a new symbol, and moving that symbol across the stage. This can prove difficult when there is a lot of interaction between the puppet and its environment, because you have to anticipate the movements of the character before you position it in its final spot in the environment.

I've had some luck moving the character through space by selecting the armature, then hitting command-A (for "select all") and moving the character by grabbing it with the free transform tool (the third tool in the toolbar).

Due on Wednesday (2/22): Two Character Designs in Your Sketchbook

Your next project will involve creating (and then animating) a character in silhouette. First we'll concentrate on creating the silhouettes, and then we'll worry about posing them so that their emotions "read" to the viewer, and then finally we'll bring them to life by moving them through a series of poses.

But first -- just worry about the silhouettes themselves. I want you to create two silhouettes, each with a distinct "essential character" or personality. These are the types of qualities that define their identity. This is the realm of stereotype, and of course you can ultimately play against what the "essential character" of your silhouette appears to be. Regardless, an audience will make assumptions about characters based on that first visual cue of what they look like. So -- for example -- you could make a character that seems mean, and a character that seems nice. Or a character that seems pious, and a character that seems devilish. Vain and charitable. Wimpy and belligerent. And so on -- but you only have to pick two.

Eventually, you will have to separate out the various pieces of your character, so that they can exist on independent layers in flash. Think of them as pieces of a jointed paper doll. The pieces should include: head, neck, torso, pelvis, upper arms, lower arms, hands, upper legs, lower legs, feet. Don't worry about separating out the fingers and toes. As you are designing your character, keep in mind that at some point the pieces of your character will have to exist as separate symbols.

In Wednesday's class, you'll execute these characters in Flash. But before the start of class, I want to see a sketch of your two characters in your sketchbook.

Here's Lotte Reininger's silhouette animation from "The Adventures of Prince Achmed," which I showed in class:

Sketchbook Assignment for Wed. 2/15: Character Design Analysis

For Wednesday's class, I want you to select a cartoon character that you think has an interesting design. I want you to make a sketch of that character in your sketchbook, paying special attention to all the elements of of its design – hair, clothing, body type, facial structure, etc. In a paragraph under the sketch of the character, I want you to write out an explanation of the personality of the character, with details of how that personality is visible in the design of the character itself. For example, a character who has a sinister personality might have sharpened, pointy teeth, or heavy eyebrows that point downward. Include elements of the character's costume in your explanation as well.

Your abstract/music animation is due at the beginning of class.

Sketchbook assignment for Monday

You have a sketchbook assignment for next Monday -- or rather, two short sketchbook assignments. They are both exercises in thinking in images. They are:

1. I want you to draw a sketch of a memorable image. This could be an image from a film, a poster, a painting, a TV show, a book (in which case you'll have seen the image in your mind's eye, not in "reality") -- some vision that sticks in your brain. And then, also in the sketchbook, write a short paragraph about the image -- where you saw it, what it means -- and why you think that image is memorable.

2. Make a sketch of something memorable that actually happened to you -- in particular, something you saw or experienced that was intensely scary. It could be from a movie that you saw as a kid; it could be something that actually happened to you and really spooked you -- just make sure it's something that left an impression on you. As with the other sketchbook exercise, write a short paragraph about the scary event, and explain what made it so scary.

Here are the two videos I showed in class today: