Genius Hour Blog, Peel 3rd

I'm finally finished! After all this time, I finished my animation at 1 minute and 20 seconds. It goes through the intro, first verse, and the first chorus of the song, and it's a mix of full-body shots, a close up of lip-syncing, and written-out lyrics and descriptions. It's not the best animation I've ever seen, obviously, but considering it's my first time animating, I'm pretty happy with the result. I learned a lot while making it, too. The software isn't as good as I thought it would be, and crashed repeatedly if I used any of a few select functions once I'd gone over about 600 frames. Since this is less than a minute, it's obvious to me that this app is meant for shorter animations and people just starting out. It also messed up my audio during playbacks, so I had to go back towards the end of the process and fix a lot of the timing, which was annoying, because I thought it was already timed correctly. I also learned that animation takes a lot ...

This week I started really animating what I had planned. It's going slower than I thought it would, but I'm trying to do as much as I can each day. However, with the deadline for the project creeping up on me, I might have to shorten the final animation. At this rate, it seems like I won't be able to animate an entire two minutes in time, since so far I'm barely at over ten seconds, the majority of which is blank frames because of the intro I didn't want to use. I want to do the whole song, but I'm pretty sure it'll only be some of it. It takes a really long time to get everything looking smooth for just a few seconds, and I already have a lot of schoolwork besides this project. I definitely want to animate the beginning skating sequence and lip syncing for at least some of the lyrics, but I'm not sure how long my animation will end up being. I'm going to make sure I work on it during free time in classes (which hopefully I'll have more of now th...

This week, I worked less on animating and drawing and more on reading more into techniques and information. I requested The Animators Survival Kit from one of my two local libraries, but it’ll take a little time to get here. Meanwhile, I checked out three beginner’s books from the other library so I could start reading, though they seemed more directed towards younger people or less informed readers who have very little to no experience or understanding of animation, so a lot of the information was things I already knew. I skimmed through the three and decided that one of them was too childish with no new information and instead focused on the other two, which had good basic information. I’m sure The Animator’s Survival Kit will have more in depth information and more helpful tips. However, a few things were helpful, such as teaching the basics of timing each drawing in a fluid way and how to use squash and stretch to make movement more dynamic. Even though I had learned the majority ...