Animation part 5

Recently I have been diffuclty making progress on my project because of the my approach to my rotoscoping where I would have the character on one timeline rather then putting each limb it in to seperate layers. This meant that I had to redraw whole sections of limbs , when playing the sequence I would often notice inconsistences in the shape and size of the limbs and they sometimes looked disproportionate.

The last few days I have noticed some major problems which I have never encountered before in Flash although they weren't a significant hindrence to the project but they were increasingly frustating because I didn't know what to do to stop it or prevent it happening in my other files. There were many aspects of the problem which I've never experienced and which include the following:
-The FPS(Frames Per Second) would randomley change from the defualt 24fps to frames rates ranging between 4.5 and 6. I opened the file on a number of occasions the majority of the time this error would only occur on the first playthrough of the file.
-The file would randomely pause in play mode for a short duration of time then would continue. This also mostly occured in the first playthrough.

I later managed to finish this sequence but flash once again quit unnexpectedly whilst the file was saving which meant I had lost the file. Luckily this was non-essential to the story and was something I can easily work my way around it rather then reattempting it. I hope the problems I mentioned above don't persist because they could potentially affect the quality of my SWF files and the final edit of my animation.

Animation part 4

Yesterday I recorded several videos in my back garden for the purpose of rotoscoping hoping it would save time because it would mean that I can create accurate body movements without distorting the proportions of the body. I dressed in combat gear used by the Russians during the time of the Soviet-Afghan war and used many props. I had some assistance from one of my friends who helped record the footage and perform some of the actions.

Before we started recording and we had to make sure that we were using the correct settings on my laptops webcam so that every detail was clear and that the light wasn't too bright or too dark. We retook many of the shots because we wanted many versions of the same action for example we recorded ourselves walking in a straight line shooting a prop gun each time we recorded it we walked at different paces and used different stances to suggest how concentrated the aiming was.

 

I also took several photographs of myself wearing the combat gear as primary reference material for my character models.

 

Unfortunately there was one major flaw which may hinder all of this work and effort, I forgot to change to change the camera setting from HD to 1600x1200. This means that I wont be able to convert these sequence in to GIF files which is very frustating and Im unaware of a method to change the HD footage in to non HD or how to successfully import files of this type into flash. If i cant figure out a way to import the footage in to flash it means that i will have to take screen shots of every frame which is difficult because the defualt video player that im using has a delayed paused.

Hopefully I will figure out how to deal with this issue very soon before it become a major issue.

Animation part 3

The last few days have been a serious struggle because I am mostly rotoscoping my character animations which has been a very lengthy process for the following reasons:
-Recording the footage and checking it multiple times to see how easy it is trace the movements
-There were many errors in the recording process , the webcam would suddenly go dark around 4 second after the recording had started.
-Editing the footage which looked good and cut out all the frames i didn't wish to use.
-Making sure that my rotoscopes were in the same frame rate and were running smoothly.

Even though these factors were a significant hinderance to my process I still manged to finish this small section of the animation to a decent standard.

Once again i've got stuck on this project on a scene showing several moving vehicles and troops. I mananged to successfully create a motion tween of an APC (armoured personel carrier) which i created in another flash document but when I copy and pasted the sequence on to my projects timeline there were many errors like symbols randomly appearing. I previoulsy attempted this same small sequence using individual frames but because the sequence is around 185 frames it felt like it would take forever.

How will I approach this technical issue?

Plan A-I am am going  to look at various online guides and tutorials to see if there is way of having multiple symbols on a single layer.

Plan B- Go back to square one and use a frame by frame technique which will take fairly and there are more likely to be inconsistencies in the animation but if I check it multiple times for errors it should turn out ok.

Animation part 2

Today I finally managed to finish the speech scene which I previously had significant difficulty doing. I've bumped into another obstacle in my animation process because I will soon be creating the action scenes which will include lots gun fights and explosions. Creating muzzle flashes for guns will present a challenge because they are usually a bright yellowish spark, if i choose to use these colours they won't contrast that much with my yellow background and they wont stand out. Importing premade muzzle flashes is sumthing that I considered but quickly realised that it would not be appropriate for the artistic approach im using.

So far i've thought of one way I could overcome this issue. Having most of the battle scenes at night so then the muzzle flash stands out from the background.

Animation part 1

I started the animation process roughly two weeks ago but have not made significant progress because I have had many difficulties creating accurate facial animations for a dialogue scene. The scene was meant to show my main character making a speech to the his troops and there are many transitions between shots of the crowd and the protagonist. One of the shots was the main character speaking in a profile view, with my first attempt I tried using a phenome mouth chart as reference but failed because it was in a front view and my profile version looked inaccurate.

My second attempt used a far more lengthy and complicated process so i summarised it in to 6 steps

1. Recording myself making the speech on my webcam
2. Saving the recording into an AVI format

3. Download a free video converter on the internet
4. Render my footage and and convert it in to a GIF

5. Import the GIF into flash

6. Rotoscope mouth movements

Unfortunately this footage wasn't that useful because the mouth movements were very subtle and looked very similar to eachother. I was trying to avoid this because its a coner cutting technique used by animators who want to save lots of time at the expense of the quality of the animation. So I may have to repeat this process but emphasising each syllable or avoid using shots of a profile views when dialgoge is included and just use over the shoulder and front shots.

soundtrack

Today I started researching what kind of music I was going to incorperate into my animation. I was also thinking about where I will find my audio,  what sound effects I should use and what formats would be best to use in my animation to advoid compatibility issues.

I also did some additional work on my animation by increasing its length and determing what angles I should use to make it more cinematic.


By next friday i hope to have achieved the following:

-The animation should be roughly 40 seconds in length
-All of my work so far should be put in to a a sketchbook/portfolio
-Have some additional development like handrawn character concepts so i can show differences between my initial designs and the character models used in the animation.
-All storyboarding should be completed

Development

Today I produced several character models for my mujahideen faction and also created several vehicle models.

The mujahideen character models were created by using reference images i found on various sites on the internet and drawing on top of the image on flash. I decided to use green as the main colour for these character models because green is one of the colours used in the Afghanistan flag and because it contrasts with the background colours and the Russian character models. 

The vehicle models were created by using technical drawings that show both front and side views of the vehicle as reference. Vehicles are mostly composed of two layers one layer for the moving parts like rotors, wheels and turrets and one layer for the stationary parts.