MuntyAC

 At the start of this project I wanted to make sure I was part of a strong and big team, I didn’t really want a leader role, my main objectives were to be the story artist and an animator. The starting phase was all we could of asked for, all of us coming up with great ideas and being able to come to a final decision quite quickly. After we decided on the bird being our main character, I went and did multiple tests of different birds learning the difference between their fight patterns. When the story was finalized, I went on to the story-boarding which was a great experience and it was a process I love as I got the creative freedom to come up with shots and create the first iteration of our animation, the final animation is a close following of the storyboard which pleased me so much. I thought I chose I great group, and the potential we had was incredible however the groups decline started with Jolanta dropping out and at the time she was our art director. This left a hole in the gr

Birds eye view of a bird - Global Bird - Scene 3 I took over Aidans shot, as he had a lot more work to do because lack of help from Alisha, and she had done a shot that was listed for me and i had already started it, the lack of communication from her and minimal effort made caused a lot of problems, mainly for Elena and Aidan. I knew the back shot i did of the bird had the potential to work in the scene. After my first edit  it still looked like it was nose diving still even after i fixed the size a added lines to make it seem that from a different angle. I don't have any working of this as i worked through this fairly quickly. After I showed it to Annabeth, she suggested the wings need a slight bit of altering and I changed about 3 frames and and the beak positioning, after i did this it looked much better. All that was left was the tail which was out of perspective now but after i fixed that the animation looked strong in my opinion. All that was left was to sync and

Sighing sadly - Global bird - scene 2 This is one of the animations that I had started on small cintiq and i found it really difficult to draw/animate/paint on the cintiq as all the lines are shaky, I  tried but got dejected knowing it wouldn't look right.  Working on the bigger cintiq much better, quicker and mistakes are far less frequent and easier to fix.When i was doing the second pass, I put a lot of effort in knowing that all the animation comes from this pass and if i don't want to have two inking passes this pass needed to fairly detailed and readable. The face and feathers were key and that needed to be done as they were the hardest to keep consistent during animating. I think that it looks really, though the lift off is a bit quick but there's enough anticipation so its not so abrupt. The timing was key on this shot as the sigh and dejected pose needed enough time to be registered by the viewer. I did find that

Flapping in the nest - Global bird - scene 1  When i was story-boarding this i wanted a funny shot so whole thing isn't so sad although I'm pretty sure it still is. Again it was hard to find reference of bird spazzing out but I managed to find a nice Pixar one.  So i went through the video and looked for key poses i liked and had a bit of dynamic movement. Second pass needed a lot more detail, would make inking easier, so i fleshed it out to best of my ability including the feathers and face. Inking this was the easiest so far, I think it was because of the dynamic movement i could get away with warping the bird. I was about half way through this and with the most the initial work done passed to Alisha to finish.

Flying into the background - Global bird - Scene 1 This is the opening shot so i want it to be good as this a first shot everyone will see. I reoccurring issue i have is finding reference of the shots i was doing. I couldn't find a good enough reference of a pigeon flying away so used an falcon because i was more concerned about the back than  the wings.  I think that it looks good and I'm really happy with perspective but doesn't look very pigeon like,so  went back and did a second pass, this time using Muybridge reference and the turnaround wanted to copy and paste frames but the perspective looked off. Inking was more of a challenge but i think it looks really nice and believable. I think i managed to capture the naturalistic feel of the flight. I always knew the back was going to be difficult because of lack of reference but I'm pleasantly surprised by how it turned out .

Looking back sadly - Global bird - Animation - scene 1  I thought i would start off with a easier shot of the bird and work my way to the harder ones. I knew that the Muybridge reference would be essential to animating to get a believable pigeon flight. I also made a construction sheet and pose sheet for other animators to use, but more of a reference to myself. Initial roughs were easy enough and didn't need to move the bird because tweening the motion would be easier than placing them one by one. Working on twos helped the speed of the animation and plus the timing was much easier to do. I'm very happy with head turn thought the blink was nice although the body psychics are off, turning the head probably changes the movement of the wing but a reference of a bird looking backwards mid flight doesn't exist. The line work was a struggle but it was slightly better than first try during sho

Presentation day First thing i have to say is that i had no participation in making the presentation as i was preoccupied trying to submit Performance and character. So all the credit goes to Elena because without her this group of been a shambles and our presentation would have been a disaster. Thankfully we had her and I believe that our presentation went the smoothest and most professional in the class. I really have a fear of public speaking and i felt like shit going up and talking. What made it as worse was when i was explaining the tests i had done of different birds, i called our bird spazzy which i regretted immediately. We didn't get too much feedback, just really to test some composites together before we fully start animating and Joe said we should change the bird on the logo, but i don't know if we will do that. We did composite tests and had no issues so we could move on to animating the bird. All credit to Elena again, the backbone of this group

The fraud is here Genuinely did not expect to get a place at MAF but you wont hear me complaining. At the briefing session i felt so out of place as i felt all these artsy farsty people knew far more than i was. With Anijam screening later on the week and we were asked if we had an animation that was going to screened, obviously i mentioned Flock together and felt like a fraud when people congratulated me. Well I guess its always good to make a good first impression. I did feel tho that was exposed when screening was shown and my clips were so horrible and pixilated because i had done it in the wrong resolution and in Photoshop. Maybe it wasn't noticeable on the phone but when blown up it looks horrendous, but we still won an award so again i cant complain, even though Adam wanted that judges award too.  I do think i let the team down but i learned so much from them two days and i cant really express how grateful i am that they let this fraud work with the

Framing the Story I had specifically requested to be the story-boarder as this a field of animation/media i can see my self pursing. From the knowledge i gathered last year about shot progressions and film grammar i applied this to the best of my ability. The majority of the information I got was from Sherm Cohen video, i have a more in depth blog on that video https://muntyac.blogspot.com/2018/03/sherm-cohen-story-boarding-genius.html I started off with initial sketches and then doing a rough grey scale over them as i thought the white was too bland and the grey added a bit of depth. I had planned for the video just be a simple slide show but Annabeth said it would be best to have the bird moving around just with simple tweened animation so that the video could explain of the movement I want to portray. As i was just drawing them as single layers i had to back and separate the birds from the backgrounds, so I could use Premier to animat

Selling our souls I think this was an important exercise to go through as in the future this will be what we give to employers but because the purpose of this was to find a group i didn't apply my full effort. I wanted it to be more visual than anything but I'm not happy with end product, its not in a style i draw and the colours are too saturated and not pleasant to look at. Of course it could be much worse but i know in the future that maybe a self portrait would be better suited. Also i think it should be able to translate into a business care as well. Networking is something i really need to work and push my self to do more of, and be more confident in showing my work and being proud of it. If you're not excited about your work no will be.  

After effects sessions Ball bounces and pendulum  Annabeth and Jame thought it would be best to teach the class the basics of after effects and have us all have a basic under standing of the software. I was fairly familiar with after effects as there's is almost an endless supply of tutorials online but I think shows the depth that after effects can go into. We started off with simple functional animations such as the ball bounce and pendulum, i wish that we learned this last year as it was far easier to in after effects, and i think would of assisted me in stop mo and definitely in Maya.  As you can see the graphs are much clearer and i think easier to understand, this kind of knowledge is really useful as most people would think this is really complicated but to us animators this is much friendlier to us.  As well as the ball we did a pendulum, and furthered that and made a leg with moving parts using the bone tool. I had layere

Belbin roles - Making a balanced team  Going into this session, I still hadn't decided on which group i want to join but Annabeth said it should be decided by the end of this session. I had offers from a few groups but decided to join up with Jolanta, Elena and Alisha as i knew i wanted to another attempt at a 2-D group project and i felt like this team had good chemistry and was full of talented artists. Annabeth explained Belbin roles to us and how these 9 personalities make a strong balanced team.  When going through the Belbin roles i found that these four applied best to me;   Monitor Evaluator  -  I feel this suits me well as i know that the critical side of my brain is over developed and have always thought i had sound judgement when it came to decision making. Working very slowly resonated too deeply and is something I'm trying to work on. Team Worker -  I feel that my social relation when working in a group is always good, i try resolve situat