Animation focused workshop 2

Today for the first few lessons Ruby was at an exam, and Jess was absent, so I got along with my animating jobs. I finished a piece in which the protagonist of the sequence's iris/pupil expands in shock, and the word 'JUMP' flashes across her eyes, as this is a vital portrayal of the panic Kow-one experiences at the thought of jump, a thing she has never learned before, flashing across her mind.

I am very pleased with the way that it turned out, actually, as eyes are not a strong point of drawing for me, and animating the inner iris was a challenge for sure.

After this I looked back on my plans for the sequence, and decided that either I would not include or I would do next week the close-up run-cycle I have planned, and so I began work on a cycle of Kow-one breathing deeply after stopping running (this will come after she reaches the wall, and just before the 'jump' eye scene.). This provided to be more difficult than expected, and I redid the colouring several times due to me not favoring the colour scheme, and had difficulty with the jaw line (I ended up looking up female jawlines for guidance), but the final scene which will only last a little while is satisfactory I suppose.

Finally, I decided on a way of putting all the aspects of our film together. Ruby and Jess have finished their scenes and Ruby photographed them, so I am exporting my flash work scenes as .swf files and importing them to Adobe Premiere Elements, so that I can loop / add effects with more ease and availability, plus it means I can add the music (I decided on the track today, one of my favorite songs from an album inspired by a webcomic, a haunting refrain that has the melancholy / dramatic effect I want to portray through the video, the part of the track I am going to use is from 00:47 onwards) and the voiceover (Ruby and Jess will record next week, the lines are almost directly from the story itsself.)
The weaknesses in the animation currently mainly lie in some minor glitches in the sequences (e.g the neck blotch seen on one frame in the gif above), and in the large gaps in the film left by the missing scenes I am yet to create, plus I need to work on the music syncing.

Music (it's pretty rad you should listen to it):


My plan for next week is to finish the last three or four scenes that I need to complete, and edit the voiceover, animation, hand-drawn pictures and music together into a final piece of work. It will be a challenge and it will be a lot of work, but I think we as a group can handle it.

Overall I am happy with how this project is progressing, as me and my group have taken something from a good piece of short literature and shaped it into something that is somewhat our own, and throughout the character designing, animating and editing, I have found that my ideas have been becoming more vivid in my mind, and I can see this becoming a decent piece of work. I am also pretty excited to have our work displayed in the Arnolfini, as it is a place I go to quite frequently and to have our work shown is an honour. As well as having my ideas become more prominent, I think that I have improved my flash skills greatly, as at the beginning of this project they were rusty as old heck and I was struggling with things as trivial as motion tweens, whereas now I feel a lot more confident with the software and am considering investing in saving up to buy it myself.