Sketchbook 3
A lot has happened in two weeks…
GIF updates uploaded at a low resolution because they are works in progress. File size is in the back of my mind because GIFS get very large, so if I let them get too big I think they won’t be fit for being sent via text. Something to keep in mind.
Animated the mountain and decided against it.
As I animate I am thinking about how rigid vs. how natural I want the flowers’ movement to be. When I first started, I free-handed the motion until about halfway through the duration (3 seconds), and then I referenced the first frame so that I could bring the image back to its original size and position–completing the loop. Then, instead of referencing the first frame at once I made it halfway, I tried breaking down the movement into about four stills and animating in between these stills so that I didn’t veer too far off track. I found this was more time efficient and has a cleaner look, but gives the flowers less freedom to move in their own way. The above photo shows references in the layers panel, showing how I reference the first frame to complete the loop.
I went through a few variations on the human character. Originally I wanted the character’s body to be bubbly and round to contrast the pointy petals of the flowers and the tree. This is because in the next GIF the person and the flower will fuse, so I wanted their bodies to have distinct characteristics so that the viewer could delineate where each character beings and the other ends.
Although I am interested in the moment before the person and the flower touch or make contact, I scratched the pose of the person with a hand out about to touch the flower, because I felt like it was too one-sided and made the flower passive. While I think this was the right choice, I do feel like it is less obvious now that the person and that specific flower are interacting. Maybe this is something I should edit.
I decided I wanted to test how a collage-ish style would look, because I have been interested in collage recently and have been doing digital collage through Photoshop for a graphic desing class I am taking this semester. I learned how to mask in After Effects from this video I experimented with photos I took last semester.
My intention for the shading of the figure was to add texture and create a more interesting composition. I like this water-y brush, but it does give a ghostly effect I am not totally interested in. I think I will add a an opaque layer behind the figure. Also, the human is the only element of the GIF that is not “totally” animated. It was taking significantly more time to animate the person’s figure than anything else and I decided it was not worth the time. Instead of animating 72 frames, I did 24 and duplicated them. I am slightly concerned about how fast the shading on the person’s body is moving, and I do feel like it is noticeable that the figure’s motion is looping on a shorter timeline than the rest of the composition. But, I have to keep moving.
I am interested in how this collage is turning out. While I think it can be tuned more, I need to keep moving along with my work in order to dust the cobwebs from my brain from looking at this piece for a while, and keep pushing through my proposal.
Speaking of proposal…
Although really the only person who is reading these posts right now is Professor Dinkins (hi👋🏻), I am going to put my proposal here for myself so that if I look back on this post in the future I can see my proposal and how I was thinking about the project, and because we worked on it in the time between the second sketchbook and this one.
I am putting my resume and bio here for reference as well…
