New Pen!

And I wish I'd got this one much sooner. My old pen has left my sketchbook looking like it is trying to have white pages with all the smudge marks all over them. I thought perhaps it was just the fate of a white gel pen to smudge uncontrollably, but alas the last 4 pages of my sketchbook are beautifully clean. Oh well.

Enough about pens, today I nervously took to the stage for 70 seconds and showed an entire group of visual communicators my animation. It went down really well! Except for that blasted tea tree...I bet no one knows it's a Camellia Sinensis either. I would have liked a synchronised gasp of "look at the brilliant camellia sinensis!" But it was more like "look it's a tree." What a waste of time.

Anyway, I digress. So I made some changes to the way the text appears at the tree bit, bearing in mind the amount of time I spent keeping it all in rhythm with the music. I'm worried now that it will look really disjointed, but I'm hoping the fact that the text is easier to read will keep the viewer's attention away from the unrelated background behind it. And there you have a finished Flash animation, ready to be handed in with pride tomorrow morning. It's been fun, the caffeine has been exquisite, and the company delightful. I bid you farewell.

Death by Gel Pen

This is a slow and painful death, filled with false hope and regret. I made the mistake of buying a sketchbook with black pages for this project.

"Hey this looks like fun" I thought. I already had a white gel pen which I could use to write on it with. After that ran out, I was only a fraction of phased. It's now 2 days before the hand in at 10 o'clock at night and my second pen runs out. Curse you BU shop! I felt so lucky as I picked up the last one on the shelf. I thought it would see me through to the end.

How wrong was I. I don't have much to do with my new one, but I have to buy it anyway. And quickly. For about an hour I have been watching the level of ink in my pen drop, thinking there was more than there actually was. I regret the black sketchbook and will never do it again.

Other than this minor setback, I have a finished animation which I can show in the critique tomorrow, complete with soundtrack. I've tweaked it all over the place and it's looking passable. It's come such a long way.

Convinced?

The point of this project I guess was to make a point and convince the audience of the message.

So are you convinced? I think I might just go make a cup of tea now actually.

Tea but not as you've ever know it

Here is some more animation. I got really bored towards the end...I don't think this will be staying in.

I've just realised how random this is starting to look!

Rethinking

This time round, I'm going to make my animation fit a piece of music instead of finishing the animation and finding a soundtrack to give it.

The Critique...

Well, this wasn't so bad. But seeing my animation projected on to the screen in big, I realised I didn't like it too much at all. It has no direction or purpose, and although I've made a stoyboard, I'm still pretty much making up the whole thing as I go along. Time to rethink.

Movement (I can't quite justify calling it an animation)

It went a little bit funny when I transferred it from my laptop onto the Mac at uni, but it's a (new) start.

I decided to simplify EVERYTHING. There will be a chalkboard background eventually, but for now I'm concentrating on getting the main animation done.