The Finishing Touches

I spent my free weekend time making little tweaks to some of the shots in this sequence that bothered me. They were minor things - but after I made the changes, they made a HUGE difference. As I work, I always do the best I can to "keep it moving" so I don't get stuck with pointless little details. Sometimes as I move forward, I forget things that I've learned in the past.

In the case of these two shots, I forgot about what little information you need to read an action. The tweak here was that the alien raises a note that Santa looks at. One shot had the note close to settling and the next shot continued the settle (always cut on action kids). I liked the previous shot's last pose so much, that I left too many frames in and the hook-up was flat. I realized - you don't look at the note in the fist shot - only the second. You need to read the "action" - not the "message" here. Removing the frames at the end gave me frames to add with the alien reaching behind his back (which was too rushed originally). Just goes to show how effective an editing process can really be.

The other tweak had to do with the Santa jumping shot. I had a two poses at the end that read better as one pose. Another hard call because the removed pose looked good - just didn't work after tremendous effort to make it work. Another lesson of simpler is better.

So you probably noticed by now that the Alien is holding up a note to Santa that he wants a little boy. This is the big "surprise" of the film. The story is set up where you are made to think the obvious, but learn that the boy is just as much an alien to the Alien. The boy and the Alien are really meant for each other. This is a wholesome little tale where two who are meant for each other find their way to be together. I love this sappy crap.

At some point, I'll talk about all the visual parallels I created that subtly tie the boy to the Alien throughout the film.

2 For the Price of 1 - Almost

I'm working on 2 shots that are closely related. I was hoping on finishing both tonight but there are some minor hook-up problems that I need to fix before I can sign off. Darn is all I can say. I'll elaborate later when I'm not so tired. In the meantime, here's an image from the first of the 2 shots. I'd show the other one but it reveals a little surprise that would be more fun to see later...
Thanks everyone for the nice comments you've been leaving here.

Here are a few frames from this long shot - I finally finished tonight. The whole sequence has a nice feel to it - I'm really happy to see this cut together with the previous Alien planet shots.

In the end, I wish that I had more screen time to devote to this shot - I feel like the action hits a little too fast here - but there is none to spare. It works and moves nicely - I'm just used to longer pauses. As long as you catch the Alien flying into the hat - it should be OK.

Check back soon for more on the next shot!

In the thick of things...

I'm still working on this biggie. Just one character, but he's constantly moving. Falling a little short of my mental goal, but at least it's coming along nicely.

As you can see, I'm using Macromedia Flash for the animation. The look I'm going for is more "traditional" than "Flash-looking" - I'm going for a hand drawn quality. I take advantage of what Flash has to offer on the inbetweening end (in symbols) for subtle movement that would be a pain to inbetween, but for the rest I try to draw and keep the human imperfections. In this example, you can see I work with the outlines of the vector art so I can see what's going on with the overlapping elements. "Keys" (not pictured) are used to generate main poses, culminated from either already existing symbols from another scene, or are hand generated in the computer. Early on, I did a lot more paper line clean up and scanned them in - but lately the computer is more my friend, and I skip the paper cleanup step. Since I already have a handful of Santa scenes done, I had quite a few heads that I could re-use in this shot. The Aliens at this point can almost entirely re-use symbols from other scenes. That's one of the benefits of being closer to the end of a project. But even though there is all this re-use, the decision making and crafting still takes up plenty of time.

Santa's Dance with Aliens

This shot is during a musical interlude where Santa confidently tries to capture one of the many little aliens. Equipped with a butterfly net, he pops out of his hiding place prepared to capture. He quickly discovers that the little guys can be more of a hazard - and is forced to duck and jump a few. Santa ends up accidentally capturing one in his hat, and the shot ends with him peaking in.

This was one of the shots that proved more difficult to board in the beginning stages of the project. How Santa goes about capturing an alien wasn't completely clear to me at the start, and my initial boards were a little more direct, without all the fun action that the shot now contains. There is a lot of stuff taking place during this small chunk of time. All the rework this shot went through was well worth it because this is (in my opinion) one of the best shots in the whole short.

Today I'm about half way through the animation - probably through the weekend before this one is done.

AFC on PSP

I was playing around with a file compressor for PSP last night. I'm not real technical, but this one was pretty easy to use for me: http://www.pqdvd.com/psp/
I initially had some trouble - the image was scrambled over some of the shots that contained subtle gradients and occasionally the sound would transfer out of sync or scrambled. After a while messing with settings, I finally had a decent transfer. I was transfering from a compressed AVI file - I didn't notice the ability to convert a Quicktime file. A friend later told me that the troubles could have been lessened if my hard drive was defragged. I don't defrag too often.
Anyway, there's a free demo to give it a try - which will also work for a video iPod. It's nice to be able to have the animation in a pocket size device.

Back from LA. While I was there, I did manage to finish the animation to this scene in between watching a few seasons of "Gilmore Girls". Go ahead and laugh. It's true. No resolutions were made this year - I just hope to keep up the momentum I've had as of late. One goal I'd like to obtain would be to finish the 4 remaining shots of this sequence this month - let's see what happens...