Evaluation.

The first thing that comes to mind that I would do better if I was to do this again, would be to organise myself better. Not time-wise, but saving my frames, their names, etc. 
After Effects really needs organised files to keep it in order and as to not confuse myself. I, however, found myself confused multiple times as I'd saved the files in folders that are in other folders, etc. So if I was to do it again, I would name the files more appropriately and have an order to my folders, before I even got to making the animation. Which was another bad habit I found myself doing. Instead of creating the characters and extra bits to add to them, I created them as I went along. I think maybe this was because I;
1. Wanted to see what it was looking like before I carried on.
2. I didn't really see how I was going to work the finer points until I had a play.
I still think even though these points would ring true if I did it again, that I should make the pictures and organise a folder to place them all in before, so that at least when it  came to having to make extra bits, I could keep the order going, and not just add new folders to existing ones.


All that being said, I'm quite proud of my final animation as I hadn't really had much experience making an animation from scratch before. I have made GIF images before, so I had an idea how it worked, but never had I made one from scratch, storyboarding, or used After Effect before. I hadn't really used Illustrator much besides the mentioned work experience that I did, either. 
I think the story I had in mind came out close enough to how I wanted it, of course it's not perfect. I'd of got Disney to do it if I was that picky. But I think it shows a clear understanding of my story, and I believe I told it in a clear way.


I always liked the thought of animation as a direction for my study choice, but although I find it fun and creative to design and make the characters, as well as thinking of a story, I do find the whole animating process tediously repetitive and gave myself a headache quite often. So I think it'll have to stay an occasional hobby, for now.

Finito.

Tweaked a few things again:

• shortening the beginning zoom (7 seconds, far too long!)
• adding moving lines to sliding bull scenes
• adding the matador passing out
• credits(the end)

Finito! 

Almost finished.

Reached the 30 second limit, but I may tweak some bits. Here is my 'almost' finished animation. 

Quick overview/changes explained.

So looking back over my animation I decided it was too 'simple' and so I've added extra little animations to the characters inbetween. This meant I had to change the design of one of the bulls, but only a small fraction, the tail, so that it could wiggle as it ran - I got this idea from the existing bullfight animation previously stated in an older post. I also added a background, and other small details reactions/actions. I think even though they're only little bits it's really began to make my animation come to life, and I find even though it's very time consuming, the end result it very pleasing and I enjoy the process. If I had drawn the animation frame by frame, my patience would've warn thin and I wouldn't of been able to create extra things as I'd be busy drawing rather than actually animating and I prefer to see development rather than wait till last minute to combine it together. It would be far too tedious for me to draw each frame out and not know if it was going as I wanted it to. This way, using illustrator, I can move part of the character, then move it back, or add to/take bits away, and still have it intact for if I need it again. It also allows me to use colour, which I think is always nice to have in a cartoon. I did some work experience at the end of last year as my own little side thing to uni, which gave me experience in Illustrator that I've found useful in this project.  (Making Sense - Workstation - Sheffield.)
(It would've been handy to have had experience with a graphics tablet, though. Mouses, or in my case, a mouse pad, isn't the easiest thing to draw on a computer with.)

tracing in illustrator

First of all I drew my characters as shown in previous posts, I then opened them in illustrator and traced around them, each feature including background colour, and outline, having it's own individual layer.

I did this with every one of my drawings, and was able to tweak them a little without redrawing them all, to add movement, then exported as a .png file, with a transparent background. However I didn't cotton on to how to do that until I reached this part of the animation, so the zoom-ins at the beginning didnt have this. I was going to go back and change it, but I didnt think it needed a background as it's just introducing the characters, and the background is to help show movement in my animation. 

background:

but to make it more in the background, I gave it a 50% opacity.

More character drawings

Drawn characters to trace in illustrator.

Smugly wearing cape.

grabbing cape 

edit: after drawing each arm movement seperately in illustrator, I found that exporting it had an unwanted, resizing effect, and therefore made it look awful. So I changed it somewhat so that I did have to change it too much to cause it to resize when exporting.

confused matador face to add to existing body

sliding bull

A few advertisements..

Here are a few advertisements I've seen on TV whilst doing this project:

T Mobile / Orange stop motion

Billboard Chat
Watch the ad...

Better quality video here

BBC2 Zoetrope

Jelly legs

Well I finally made myself giggle, and tested it out on my family, and made them giggle, so, so far so good.  Just need to finish the rest! 

Progress?

Running Bull Scene

Legs:

Because I was making the bull run with rotational legs, I didnt need any detail of the leg, as it'd be a blur, I just needed the colours, so I put together two shades of brown, and black(as the hooves would've been black) and made them into a circle. 

To make the timings I had to make sure the legs were already rotating so that this picture as a still couldnt be seen, otherwise the 'magic' behind the scenes would've been shown, so to make sure it was already moving, I selected the rotation transform to key in before the picture was shown, the bulls body wouldn't move until a few seconds after both legs had been rotating for a short while, and then it's 'run' off screen. however the timings and position couldn't be the same as the body because one was the back and one was the front, so after moving the bulls body, I had to slide the legs across to see where the legs would appear and then do it off screen, so it kept in place on the bull. I kept them moving after they were off screen, just to be sure that they wouldn't stop before the scene was over.

Colour Tester

As the quality of the video seems to either lose colour or go blocky, I decided to see if it was the colours I'd chosen in Illustrator that was having an effect on the final outcome of the video. 

As bloggers video's arent very good quality, I decided for my final one I would use YouTube.

Zoom Colour

Tester with illustrator images. I think this looks a lot more crisp. 

Characters in Illustrator

Bull running,

This section is a little lighter than I'd hoped and doesnt really work well. I'm not quite sure why but I'm hoping that after I've drawn it into illustrator it'll work much better.

Bullfight animation by giwilliamson:

DUCK Studios:

Lets Get Animating!

So I started off by drawing each individual picture, and decided it was taking far too long, when I could do it on the computer much quicker. So I decided to draw the full picture, and zoom in, and then reverse the action for after effects, simpler number them backward. Zooming isnt really an issue, seen as its just one picture that's need. I did this for the bull and matador.

Seen as the pictures were a little blurred, I decided I'd trace them in illustrator, and add colour, too.
Also for the bull to move quickly, instead of drawing each leg alternate, I decided to use the cartoon effect of having a swirl rotate and get faster and have it run off the screen. I thought this affect made it look more cartoon-like, and 'angry'. 

unfinished.

It's a puppetttt!!

After Effects tutorial number... 3? I think. Learning to use the puppet tool, amongst other little niblets. 


Outcome:

Storyboard.

The music starts dramatic (decided on the first 30 seconds, as it's the most dramatic 30seconds), so I started off with the bulls angry eyes, then zooming out to full face.


First 30 seconds of music unedited:

Sketches/ideas

First idea was a scorpion, however I decided that seen as I will be repeating it over and over, that maybe a scorpion wouldn't be the best option for me, and if it didnt have a mexican sombrero, it wouldn't be recognised as mexican. The obvious choice would be to do a mexican stand-off, so I started to try and differ from that, and drew a few sketches for characters I could use that reminded me of Mexico.


Character ideas:

Some ideas were:

• Scorpion stand-off,
• Fajita eating contest - peppers alive, scared, etc.
• Exam? Time on the walls, student sweating, panicking the times almost up.
• Mexican wave.

I liked the characteristics of the bulls so decided to go with bullfighting, but add a spin to it. My initial idea was for the bull to run up to matador and fling him into the air, but after bouncing around ideas I decided on having the bull being playful, and just running up to the matador, sliding under the red cape, snatching it, and putting it on and looking cool. But the matador could be a wimp, shaking and sweating, then passing out at the end once he realises he's okay, and the bull is just performing. I wanted to take away from the serious competitiveness of the sport, as I don't really agree with it, so instead of making it serious, I added some fun to it. Making my characters exaggerated and fun. I did a little research into bullfighting, but mostly just to see what the matador wore, and not much else, as I didn't want to be to strict about it.

I needed a matador:

Cell Animation [practise]

For our cell animation practise we paired up to create a short story, start - middle - end, and drew our characters to animate it. Laura and I drew a cactus and scorpion(taking my idea from the start, to practise how it would move) and the story began with the cactus dancing in the sun, when the scorpion comes over and notices he's wearing a hat similar to his own, so gets angry and storms towards the cactus. Only for the cactus to retaliate which shocks the scorpion into patheticness, and giving up, as he gets squashed to the ground.
36 frames later and it turned out too fast, so I stretched it in After Affects to make it last 5 seconds, which seemed to make it look better, however the end when the cactus falls onto the scorpion is too slow, so I would speed this up.

Expression/Emotion

So to start off drawing some storyboards, I needed to find out how to show the emotion in my characters that I wanted, how do I make the audience see that my character is scared? stressed? confused? angered?
So I did a search on how to draw facial expression anime/cartoons.


here is a few I found most useful:

• 50 Facial Expressions and How to Draw Them

angry                                   confused                                  scared

happy                                       furious                               nervous

• Lackadaisy Expressions

Other sites I found that varied in usefulness:

• Facial expressions for cartoons
• Draw Furry
• Dave Gray
• How To Draw

Workshops

As I was too busy trying to remember everything I was taught in the workshops, I didnt really get chance to proof it all, so I took a few screencaps of the work I was doing, and here is a few from the rotation and opacity captures.

Importing a video: