©2011 Mindy Fisher
Here’s what I did since my last post…added curtains, a rifle and a nightstand (with lamp). I also started working on some of the character actions. I know that the perspective is pretty wonky (especially with the old lady in the bed) I might fix that if I have time. But this image will be in the video for less than a second so it’s low priority.
I whipped this up tonight…not sure how long it took because I kept getting distracted by youtube videos of ice skating on sidewalks and bon jovi. Pretty much everything I’m using is here except for another foot!
One of the ducks. There are layers for each of the feet, the wing, the body and the parts of the beak.
Another backdrop from the animation I’m working on…a farm. The green thing in the middle is a pen for ducks and geese (and their heads pop out during the video).
Here I have the final member of Tangleweed, Kip Rainey. I drew 9 heads for him since he is one of the vocalists for this song. I didn’t bother making more than one of each hand this time. For the first scene he’s in I’m doubtful that anyone will even really notice that he’s not really strumming. My boyfriend and I were watching Metalocolypse clips to see how they animate instrument playing. The animators for that cartoon let the hands stay still and the arm takes care of all of the movement. And I have a feeling that is how most animated cartoons are made…but if his scene was longer I would probably put more detail into it.
Here’s Paul W. from Tangleweed. He plays a bass that he made out of a vintage suitcase! For Paul I made 3 heads and two hands. So far I’ve only used one of the heads but might use others for other scenes.
©2010 Mindy Fisher
Billy Oh from the upcoming music video I’m working on. I made about 9 heads and all of the limbs are separate layers so they can move. This will probably only be in about 10 seconds of the video!
Feather Head
Animation and Background by Mindy Fisher
Character by Kelly Pelka
Music by A.M
So this is the first time that I created a full film. Actually it’s more like one scene with credits at the beginning. It is very short, but i really just wanted to use it to brush up on motion tweens, titling and adding music. The process is documented below:
1. I played around with making a background in Photoshop which is the very first frame. After that I created about 30 more layers and changed the background bit by bit making it come to life.
2. I imported the backgrounds in flash and changed them into symbols. I used the alpha option to fade from background to background which gives it a neat stop-animation feel. In the future I think I want to continue morphing the background throughout the entire video…I don’t love how it just stops when the “stars” are flashing.
3. I looked for a song on the amazing Free Music Archive website. There is tons of great music to use and it would have taken ages to find the perfect song. They have an option to search by artists who allow their music to be synched to video. I clicked that. Then to narrow my search down I typed in different keywords that I thought described the atmosphere of what I had so far…and found “Somewhere Between Night and Sky” by A.M after listening to about a dozen songs.
4. I downloaded Audacity so that I could edit the song down to fit my very short video.
5. I found the character from my friends (kelly pelka) flickr account, I asked for permission first. It’s actually a metal sculpture with feathers that she and Todd Willing collaborated on. I put that in photoshop, erased the background and put the head and each wing on separate layers. Then I imported that into Flash and turned those into layers. Normally I am going to use my own artwork but I envisioned something by her in this background.
6. Then I created the titles which was a little bit of an ordeal. I hadn’t started with that so then I had to learn how to add more frames to all the layers so I didn’t mess up the rest of the video. This is where mistakes can really teach you how to do things right.
7. Then I added the feather head character. I learned that in order to make the feathers flap I had to edit them separately by double clicking them and adding motion tweens. I was going to have the head fly around but didn’t really like how it looked. Instead I have it start as an alpha layer and become more opaque then fade away as well as grow in size while staying in the middle. Another thing that was frustrating me was that the right feather had a white highlight around it, even though I had erased everything around it. I couldn’t fix it without going into photoshop so I just copied the left wing and flipped it.
8. Lastly I had to encode it so that I could upload it to YouTube. When you do this you have to export the file as a .mov or .avi file. Then you add it to Media Encoder where you can change it to a FLV file.
All in all I probably put in a good eight hours of work just for 20 seconds of video (and if I had hand-drawn everything that would have taken much, much longer).
See Also: Bird Animation
Ornaglyphology 