Sunday, January 26, 2014

taglines and production stills

Links to festival programs, showing production stills and taglines:

• Annecy
• Hiroshima
Animafest (Zagreb)
• Ottawa

blog format














• use the simple template (like this blog)

Pages:
Journal: place homework videos & other images. This is where posts are created.
About (Production Still, Tagline, Inspiration, Character History, Influences)
Shot List & Production Calendar (link to Google Drive document). Template here. Shot List gives dates for specific tasks. For most of you, this means: rough animation, cleanup, coloring, and compositing/editing. The Production Calendar uses class dates to indicate what will be finished for a specific week, loaded on the blog by 9am. These need to be clear and easy to understand, with color-coding for work that has been done.
Naming Conventions (folders, shots, character drawings, backgrounds, sound, etc.). See link on "The Ogre & the Mermaid"for an idea of how to organize your drawings. Naming convention suggestion, below:

my junior animation (folder) > (folder) sh01 >

(file) sh01_001_chicken.jpg (for character)
(file) sh01_bg.jpg (for background)
(file) cluck.aif (for sound effect)

Identify an image by its shot number, the drawing number, the character or background it portrays, and the type of file it is.

Organize PSD's by labeling each layer in a multi-layered document:

sh01_001_chicken_rough
sh01_001_chicken_clean
sh01_001_chicken_color
sh01_layout
sh01_bg

Depending on your technique and approach, you may need to create the following folders:

• animation > shot #
• backgrounds > shot #
• sound
• project (After Effects and Premiere)

Put these sub-folders in a single, main folder called "junior animation," or whatever the title of your piece is, so that if everything needs to be transferred to another computer, After Effects and Premiere will be able to find individual items. Backup your work regularly to a second hard drive. Start now.

I find the clearest way of naming versions of the same file is to add the date. For example, successive iterations of the main timeline file (After Effects or Premiere) would look like this:

om_main_01_27_14.aep
om_main_03_03_14.aep
om_main_03_17_14.aep

etc.

(om = ogremermaid, main = main timeline, 01_27_14 = the date, and aep = After Effects Project)

One test of your ability to work with other people, as well as being able to demonstrate your ability to make it through a complex project intact, without getting lost and/or frustrated trying to find files, or versions of files, is file organization and naming. Do not leave things unlabeled or un-dated. Pretend that someone else will need to step in and easily understand how to locate a particular file.




springing into action in 2014

Hi Class!

















Welcome to Junior Animation, where you will make an animated short from the animatic you created last semester in Storyboarding.

As a reminder, these are the guidelines for the piece:

• 90 seconds to 2 minutes in duration, including titles but not credits
• in order to be accepted as finished, the work must be:
- fully animated and colored as per the agreed-upon design aesthetic
- equipped with a fully-realized soundtrack (sound effects and/or music)
- a 1920 x 1080, H.264-compressed Quicktime movie
- handed in on May 5th (Cinqo de Mayo) for the May 6th Junior & Sophomore Animation screening, to be held at 7pm in Connelly Auditorium, Terra Building, 8th floor.

This is your first opportunity to make a fully-realized animated film of your own creation. It is a large undertaking that requires organization, discipline, perseverance, and inspiration. As your first major work, it is also an experiment, and you will make many mistakes and discoveries throughout the next 15 weeks. The main thing is to keep your eye on the overall target and to make consistent, regular progress towards your goal of completion - do not let the speed bumps throw you off course.

I will serve as your guide and producer, your cattle prod and your fellow problem-solver, and you will be part of a class where everyone is expected to contribute constructive criticism and share in the process of making a film.

So let's have at it and make some animation!

~ Chris