When I Get Bigger

NEW PROJECT!!!!! I know people are getting excited, so let me explain what is going on. I will be animating a children's book! Awesome right??? I choose the book 'When I Get Bigger' written by Mercer Mayor. This is a funny book. There are many books like it. I guess you could call it a series, but it really isn't. Well, I don't think it is. I might be wrong.
I just finished storyboarding (it is to the right-sorry if you can't read it, i didn't want it to be to large of a picture as I knew it was a huge image).  This will be a fun project!!

1-14-15 Well today was interesting. I recorded myself reading the book. I went into Narnia, the teachers lounge in the middle of all the e-Communication rooms, and recorded myself. I went into Soundboard Pro or whatever it is called. It's something along those lines. Anyways, I haven't seen this program before in my life so I don't know how to do anything. I go to the internet and find out I need to create a new thingy the record your own audio. Then you press record in the new thingy you made. Well I could make a new thingy but I had no clue where the record button was and I looked for like 5 minutes after I took a bathroom break. Then I went to the door out of Narnia and yelled at Netterville because I struggle with stuff. Logan was like, I got this and besides I'm not doing anything productive at the moment. In like 20 seconds he found the record button.

I felt like a blind dumb blonde. About a minute later I recover and get to work. But Thanks Logan.

But ya, sound work took all hour. Kinda sucked but it needed to be done so I think I'm good now. I think I can continue on working with the pictures. That I've been editing. For days and days and days.

Masking critter to walk down the street

1-30-15 UPDATE TIME!!!!!! I've been editing pictures. I actually finished cutting up everything and have separate layers for everything I'm animating. Really great. Took like a week. But I did get it all done. Eventually. What took so long was filling in the holes from making layers. Using the content-aware tool can be such a pain in the butt. Not as big of pain as Maya can be, but pretty close.

Watch-hands move

I also spent a whole class period recording the words to my book. Sucks I know, but I did find out that my weird sound effects sound really funny to the rest of the world. I can see how I could sound like a dieing bird. Don't think that's a good thing but hey, if I ever need a dieing bird sound, I got one. Let's hope I won't ever need to use the dieing bird sound.

Critter buying from catalog.

I've started animating. Well I'm almost done actually. By almost done I mean I've done all the easy stuff like masking everything and moving objects across the screen. NO walk cycles because I'm not all that cool or that patient so um that hasn't happened. There also has been no major problems so that is fabulous. Got to love that. Ok that picture of the kid buying stuff from the catalog, that has so many layers of stuff! There is so much movement in that scene and it took so long!!!! Not my favorite thing to animate. Well so far. It may get worse. But I sure hope that it doesn't. I don't think I could handle that.

Critter going to bed.

I need to time everything out go my beautiful voice. I did do a rough for Nutterbutter. I'll look at it again Monday so I can write down the times when I need to show a certain scene. Let's hope that will all I need to do for timing. I don't want to spend forever on the timing. That could be sooo annoying. Then I'll take that to my final compilation of animated stuff. I think I'll be finished with this project soon. Maybe. But awesome right???




2-2-15 Today I finished my rough!!!!! I think that Nutterbutter will be cool with my horrible rough. Hopefully. Though I think that it will help me figure out how long each page needs to be. I think I need to speed up some of the things I've animated. Here is my rough:

 

I've finished all the animation pieces for all my pages. I just need to make sure that the time out with my voice. That might not be so fun. But it does need to be done. I'll do all that torture tomorrow when I have time to do stuff. This week I might not get a ton done. In class we're going to be watching the Box Trolls movie so I don't think I'll get much done Wednesday or Thursday. Or Netterville will lie to us and not have us watch the movie.

2-5-15 Netterville lied. Not watching a movie. But that does mean I get to work on my project!!!! So happy! I'm in the painstaking process of fine tuning the final animation. I want to have background music, but I need to decide what kind of music I should have playing in the background. I have a ton of music to choose from but deciding which track is difficult.

intro idea

Ok fine tuning isn't as bad as I thought. Maybe I should stop complaining about like everything. But it does take such a long time!!!! I wish it went faster! Why does the ram preview take so long? I need it to hurry up so I can fix things in my animation and make sure that everything is timed out to the wonderful sound of my voice. This needs to go faster!!!!

2-7-15 While editing I found out that I hadn't done anything to this one part at the end of my animation. I totally forgot that I wanted Netterville to teach me how to make the critter kid to blink. I thought it would be cool to do something that not many other people wouldn't do and wouldn't know how to do. But I didn't think it would be as hard as it is. Mast special effects aren't that hard. This one(the resizing effect) doesn't fall into that most category. It is hard and painstaking. It looks cool when you do it right though. Mostly because the harder the effect is to do, the cooler the effect looks.

Resize effect.

The way that the resize effect is set up isn't the most user friendly but I think that once you play around with it and kinda understand how to work the effect, it isn't all that bad. But it takes so slow to process(in the ram preview). Oh the resize tool allows you to take an image and take a part of and and make it move to a different spot. It like does sequential animation for you. It's really cool. But not many people have used it, so I'm special!!!!! I mean I already knew I was special, but now I have a reason to say that I am.

 2-25-15 I think I finished! Finally. Tomorrow I'll hit the chopping block to see what I could do with it to make my animation better. That'll be fun.What I've mad credits. I didn't want to have the credits just roll through so I put them on top of the critter walking to bed. I think that it isn't a very distracting background because you saw the critter walking to bed many seconds before the credits start and you can still see through the credits to the critter. So I think that it works.

The intro has kinda changed from what I originally thought it'd be. I think that's a good thing. But when I face the chopping block, I'll see how bad it is. I really don't know if I like the intro. I mean it isn't horrible, but it isn't the greatest thing ever either. So I'm not really sure if I like it or not.

Other than that, I've done some nitpicking over the rest of my animation. That's really it.

Here is my pre-chopping block animation!

3-03-15 I've faced the chopping block. I don't need to really fix much. Just some white edges that are annoying to look at. Then that audio piece. I know how to fix it now though!!!! So that's exciting! But that's all that's really going down for edits. It's awesome to know that I did a pretty good job the first time doing this project.

Ya I know it took forever to get my animation critiqued. It's all Netterville's fault. He forgot about me. I mean, how can you forget about ME? Well he did but then he looked at it. At least he did look at it. So we are all good guys. Need to do some editing!