In Which I Learn About After Effects Keyframing and am Befuddled by Resolutions

Okay, so here's the deal: for the first hour of this assignment I spent my time organizing this lovely picture below:

I'm really happy with how it came out for the short time that I worked on it. It's really sketchy, but it's a rough assignment anyway, so I went with scope rather than minute detail.

After finishing, I then began to move stuff around like I was in ToonBoom, expected the program to interpret my movements as insta-keyframes and go from there. No dice. After spending 30 minutes (foolishly) moving stuff around, I went to watch my progress. As the thing moved forward, I sighed. My piece wasn't moving a single inch. After being told by a class mate I was doing it wrong and was corrected- thanks by the way Amanda- I ended up finishing the movie. I then figured out to make a test-render and rendered it out.

And whatta ya know, my piece looked jankasaurus (to quote Jill.) The resolutions are mega choppy, which frankly confuses me, because the original files are really quite large and the pixels she be getting HARDER to see. Well. I'll ask Jill about it tomorrow I guess.

FIrst Project, Initial Write Up

Our first class project of the semester: create a diorama, using either procured images or illustrations, edited in either photoshop or illustrator. The first idea that my mind immediately latched onto was the idea of scale. I wanted to show a man, on the road for a quest or somesuch, and juxtapose him against large mountains in the distance- his destination. I liked the idea and ran with it.

To the left we see the man himself. Just a quick sketch here, I liked the design, and decided to move forward with the idea. Since I would be illustrating my piece, I decided to naturally use Illustrator, since vectors are crisp no matter how much you zoom in.

My decision was not without frustration, however. I haven't really used the program in a while and was immediately reminded why. You see Illustrator's brush tool has an auto-correct feature that curves your lines out, removing all "imperfections." It sucks. It completely messes with your drawing style and rounds out every corner. It's almost impossible to draw a square with the tool. It's nuts.

So naturally I tried out the pencil, the only other drawing tool. Thankfully, this did everything I wanted it to. However, the tool has one innate flaw- the line it makes is one weight, the entire time. This leads to very to drawings with no line depth, so I had to go back to the drawing board, pun most certainly intended.

Eventually, what i ended up doing was editing the above sketch in photoshop, imported it into illustrator, used the LiveTrace tool to get a rough vector, and then added another layer on top where i whited out all the imperfections. I colored him, sent him back into photoshop, and applied a sepia filter to him (I'd decided that in order to create unity in the piece I would do this with each object.) I then repeated the process for the hills, mountains, and clouds.

All in all, I like what I've done. But I probably will have to return to the pictures after looking at them all in one place. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to see the finished product once we've been taught how to go about making it.

In the Beginning

Alright, let's get this show on the road.