A preview of what I’m working on for one of my animation scenes.
Working with Illustrator & Flash
Ken and I (Alder) will be working in Flash to animate our scenes, with assets created in Illustrator, as we are much more experienced with using the two in the animation process, and also for what we wish to achieve Flash seems far more appropriate than After Effects. Although assets have already been created by Mitchell using Photoshop, they are all raster and therefore unsuitable for Flash animation, so I will be regenerating the graphics we need using Illustrator to take advantage of their much cleaner scalability.
Benefits of Flash:
- More intuitive, cleaner workspace/interface than After Effects
- Motion Tweening much more streamlined than the AE equivalent
- Movie clips can be used for easier looping of animated assets
- An external library can be used for me and Ken to easily share assets
- Vectorised graphics mean much cleaner, high-fidelity scaling
- Scenes can be used to break up long pieces of footage
Drawbacks:
- Far fewer file format options for exporting clips, although to get around this we can just export our scenes in SWF format, bring them into After Effects, and render them from there.
Animation change
We have decided to make a slight change to the animation. We are re introducing a scene that we originally cut in place of one involving the main characters and the constellation of Orion. This has been replaced by an additional scene on Earth involving the main characters waking a rooster early which in turn causes the humans on the farm to wake up in a large commotion.
It was decided that at this point the Orion sequence was too complex and didn’t add much to the story. This new sequence makes more sense in context and is very appealing visually.
Here’s an update on the poster, now it has the silhouette of the monster in the background. It makes it look a lot more “movie poster” than the previous one. Apart from any minor tweaks, this will more than likely be the final poster sent to print.
Here’s the poster for the film, which will be part of our display stand in the exhibition, probably printed in A1.
This is the final design of Professor star! Alder and I sat together and figured out a nice way of layering the details to maintain the cardboard cut-out effect.
Mitchell.
A video of Mitchell talking us through his storyboards at today’s meeting. The video became corrupt after a camera error and had to be recovered, which resulted in out of sync audio and some visual glitches throughout the footage, but it’s still watchable.
After reviewing the storyboards we’re happy with the plan and are excited to get into production. The next step is for Ken and Robert to produce the animatic, and for Alder to complete and launch the website.
Also, we decided to change a minor element of the plot; originally Altair plays with the kids and Vega tricks the cows as a sort of competition, but then later Vega also beats the Minotaurite, but we decided instead that Altair is the one plays with both the kids and the cows, giving Vega more reason to prove herself by defeating the Minotaurite by making Altair more of a show off in the beginning.