The first thing that happens in my animation is that the two robots are playing a brief game of ping pong, so I had to think about how the robots would move the paddle to hit the ball so I created 4 arm movements on different layers, and saved them as jpegs individually, to place in the animation one by one..
At this point I hadnt actually started the animation, so I decided to create the main prop in the video; the ping pong table! I created it first on Adobe Illustrator, then I imported it into Photoshop in order to easily colour it..
Traditional ping pong table colours..
So then I imported the psd files into After Effects... BIG mistake!
Creating the ball..
Hitting the ball..
I used the skills that we learnt in the tutorials at Uni to animate the ping pong ball, using keyframes in appropriate places.
Anyway so earlier I said that it was a big mistake importing psd files; this is because the file sizes are HUGE compared to jpegs, and my poor little macbook was suffering under the strain!
I soon discovered another reason why my computer was running so slowly and taking so long to render about 3 seconds of film..
Hahah, that' right, I had the canvas set to be MASSIVE, instead of the D1 Square Pixel format we were supposed to have it in, so I changed this setting, switched to jpegs and produced this movie for my first 4 seconds:
When I finish off the movie, the background will be white, but I find it easier to place images in the correct place when theyre taking over from a previous image if there is a bright background behind :)
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| process in making the 4 second film.. |
I decided to chose a quite robotic looking text, to match the theme of my animation :)
Right so I guess I forgot to take screen shots for ages haha but here are the videos still:
This video shows up to the point where the robots toss their ping pong paddles onto the table. I used the rotate and position transformations to create this, and although its a bit jolty here, later in the animation I have slickened it up a bit :)
In this 15 second portion of the movie, the robots get up to the point in the story where they first disagree about who has won the game:
This video clip is practically the same as the previous one, except that I removed the red background, to see what the final animation will sort of look like; and the announcement from the robots 'Does Not Compute' appears:
In this next portion of my video, the robots start to get frustrated properly over the confusion; I have used another rotate transformation to make the robots appear to shake with the rising tension. I changed their hue on photoshop also.. thinking about it, I could have done that on after effects too.. but oh well! :)
Ooh I found a screenshot of me changing the angles at which the robots stood, to make them appear to shake, followed by the video:
My robots are going to blow up, and using inspiration from the stills I captured from futurama clip I featured on my blog a while ago, I made my own explosion, in stages, from scratch! :)
Right, so somewhere inbetween the video just above, and the video I'm about to display, the frame rate per second was changed to 25fps, which naturally f**ked up the entire animation (excuse my french!).. I tried to change it back to 12fps again; but after effects was having none of it, and produced this video, which is terrible! The music is too fast I think, and it's just not 'right'.. :/
So then, I tried to resolve the issue by changing the frame rate back up to 25fps, and by jove, it worked! Hahah:
However, upon inspection, there are a few glitches within this video; theyre easily fixed though..
As you can see, one of the jpegs was slightly too early coming in, so I had to alter it to remove the unwanted visible red bat. There was a similar glitch to this when the right hand robot exploded too; but it's all fixed now!
*regains breath after all that*
hahah
laine.x
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