Lumber Jack Final Animation

It's been awhile since my last post put I'm going to jump back in. Since the last time I was on here I managed to finish up the animated portion of my Lumber Jack animation project. It wasn't the finished version I had in my head, but do to restrictions I had with my access to the software it was the best I could do in the time I had. I'm not going to go into detail about what they were because frankly it's a boring story to tell and a boring one to read. Instead I'm going to just give some comments about my experience making my first animated short.


First off I have to admit sticking with the process can get really hard with animation. There really is no easy trick to make the movie faster without losing quality in the final results. That took a long time to register with me. Sure there were ways to shave off a couple hours here and there that I found when animating but they took away something from the final cut.

I don't want you get the wrong idea and think that I am not happy with what I did. I am! The perfectionist in me just wants everything to look a certain way. Thats something that drives me to make better things. Its only after taking a step back that I remember this is my first time making anything like this and that I need to enjoy these days as a novice when I can be oblivious to all the things I don't know. With that in mind I can't help but look back on this project without getting excited. Not for what I made, but for what I might make in the future. I'm sure sure what it is yet. I just know it can only get better from here.

I will try and post the finished version up once I have a chance to finish up the audio. Until then here are some screen shots for your enjoyment.

Thanks for reading.

Logo Design

This week I'm keeping things short and sweet:

A friend of mine came to me needing a logo designed for a bike club he started at a teen center he works at. Needing a fresh challenge I happily accepted the "job"( I use the word job loosely as no money was ever promised, but oh well I need the practice.) The concept was fairly simple. I needed to to include bicycles, bike club and R.T.C. (the center he works at). Other than that I had complete creative control. Being the novice that I am I decided the best option was to keep things as simple as possible. I used simple lines to create the image of the bike and the letters, but I think that worked out for the best. I was able to finish the entire logo surprisingly fast. I didn't even have to bust out the ol' tablet to get it done. I managed to get everything with my mouse. Im pretty proud of how the final results turned out. Now im just hoping his bike club takes off and people can actually see my logo instead of having it falling into the messy abyss that is my disheveled desktop.

Here's the logo in all it's finished glory.

Weekly Post:
I spent most of the week working on a flash animation project for school. This is for the first scene of an animated short. I spent the week creating background images and working on the motion tweens to make them move. Heres a sample of some of the trees I have been designing for my forest scene.

I made the trees and in Illustrator and then copied them into Flash to use in the background and foreground of my scene. I was pretty happy with the style I was able to get with the pen tool. The trees blocky and jagged edges that worked well with the scene.

Aside from the background work I also started drawing walk cycles for the main character. First I created the profile view. I looked up some guides online for walking which really helped a lot. The real problems came with trying to use Flash. I had some problems at first creating new frames and filling them with drawings that had the right flow for smooth movement. My biggest problem came from resisting every temptation to throw my computer out the window when halfway through animating my computer decided that would be the best time take a break and freeze up. Everything I had done up until that point was lost to the unknown vastness of time and space or something along those lines, who knows. Long story short I had to do everything again, but I did learn a valuable lesson from all that torment. SAVE YOUR WORK CONSTANTLY. I am happy to say I now hit command S habitually after every small change made... The results are some cleaned up outlines of my character walking. Both front and profile view. 

Front:

Profile:

 My week was both fun and frustrating as I expect many of the weeks to follow will continue to be. Learning the hard way seems to come natural to me, but at least things were learned. Oh and my computer did not have fun learning the laws of gravity so theres theres that to be thankful for too. Until next week. (assuming my computer is still on one piece)

Popping My Blogging Cherry

      Blogging as still something that's new to me but I have to start somewhere. I was originally planning on waiting until I had some digital art work to post to make this an artist's blog, but after some suggestions from friends the direction of this blog changed. Instead my posts will document the process of me learning how to use programs like Illustrator and Flash in my quest to learn animation and illustration. Hopefully some people find this interesting even if it is only to laugh at my struggles and the mounting frustration that comes from my growing pains as an aspiring digital artist.

Enjoy.