Error 16

Today, Adobe CS6:

Please uninstall and reinstall the product.
If this problem still occurs, please contact Adobe technical support for help, and mention the error code shown at the bottom of this screen. 
Error: 16

And the hilarious thing is, After Effects CS6 files are not backwards compatible with After Effects CS5.5, which is the version installed on the beasts at COFA.

Yet another manifestation of Murphy's Law.

Shadows

For dodgy, inaccurate, but passable shadows in After Effects:

-duplicate colour layer
-skew
-rotate
-scale
-fill
-ramp
-gaussian blur

For when animated masks just doesn't cut it.

8 days to go

No time for anything, quick update, backgrounds done, colouring 99% done, cards 90% done, leaves done, music is passably alright, foley 20% done (!!!!), shadows, blankets animation, titles/credits NOT done, and I'm giving up on animating the falling cards, so there is a single transition type falling card randomly and THAT'S IT. I mean it's not necessary to the story but it woulda helped, I reckon. Sad, sad life.


Colouring list:

Me:
-1.02
-1.08
-1.10
-1.11
-1.12
-1.13
-2.04
-3.06
-3.12
-3.18
-3.20
-3.21

Pauline:
-1.03
-1.05
-3.05
-3.08
-3.10
-3.11
-3.13
-3.14
-3.15
-3.16

Kimmy:
-1.06
-3.02
-3.03
-3.09
-1/2

Nancy:
-2.01
-2.03
-3.01
-3.19

Juliana:
-1.04

Andrew:
-2.02

So I win! ...yeah.


Backgrounds:

Michelle:
-2.02
-3.05
-3.06
-4.02

Except the backgrounds are still quite different to my style. I have assimilated 3.05 and 3.06 but I haven't time to do 2.02 before assessment.

What else... note about the cards I guess, thought I was gonna do them in AE but found it was neater and less computer intensive to warp them directly onto the frames in PS.

The leaves I did today, a bit of an issue with AE not being able to import my multiple video layers and smart objects but I put each leaf in a separate file and that worked out.

And man! The colouring in some areas is horrendous. Mostly my fault coz I told people quantity over quality, but I cringe.


Final (thereabouts) look:

Gonna add a glow thing to it on Susan's suggestion and coz it do look nice.

Finally got around to zooming in the cards sequence and it's good after all.

Shadows takes longer than expected. Gah.

No other progress shots today, too busy progressing.

And I'll post up a list of festivals and stuff soon, just after I finish this... ok that's not soon.





Photoshop tip of the day:
Hold down R for one second to temporarily activate rotate canvas tool.

Timing

The best way for timing out frames for me was in After Effects I found. Originally I was going to do it in Photoshop, but since most of my colouring people didn't use Timeline anyway, and also a host of other issues with After Effects not interpreting the layers right that I can't remember right now, After Effects was the way to go.

The files had to be really clean first however. I separated each shot into two separate files, colour and line. I got rid of any groups, and made sure each layer was on max opacity; it screws with you later otherwise.

Also important was to get rid of any Timeline information remaining on the Photoshop files. I couldn't figure out a nice way to just turn it off so I had to first switch it to Frames and then back to Timeline, so that all the layers would be active at once, then duplicate it to a new file. Frames puts everything on zero opacity though so had to remember to max that.

Or you could just duplicate twice. Whatever floats your boat.

So that way I get clean, consistent layers to work with in After Effects. You know, there is probably a way to clean up stuff in AE anyway, but I couldn't find any, so it was just neater to have everything there on import.

On working in AE, I gotta remember to do this:

• Set durations of pre-comps
• Set pre-comps to 25fps

Plus these amazing shortcuts:

• [ or ]  -->  Move In point or Out point of selected layers to current time
• Alt+[ or Alt+]  -->  Trim In point or Out point of selected layers to current time

Plus if you want to preserve the blending mode effects (like the transparency from Multiply) in a pre-comp, collapse transformations. I don't know why that works, but it do.

Character animation complete

I think this is 9 weeks behind my original schedule.

Nevertheless, it is something to be glad about.

Upcoming: scanning, colouring, backgrounds, shadows, cards & leaves & blanket animation, foley, in order of priority.
Yes, I am terrible.

Animating the laugh

As the only piece in my animation that I was syncing to audio, animating the laugh posed a couple of new challenges I guess. I had a rough idea in my mind of viewing the audio as a waveform and writing down the timings of bits, and then maybe roughly testing out the timing of some keyposes, but which software? Doing it directly in Photoshop was my first preference, but although you could bring in audio, there was no way to view the waveforms, so it lacked the precision I was after. Next I tried Premiere Pro and Flash. Premiere was irksome, and I never liked it anyway, so I gave up on that. Flash would have been ok, except the recording was a bit on the quiet side, and so the waveforms were invisible. There seemed to be a limited way of resizing the timeline, plus I couldn't get the audio to play, so I ditched that and went to Audition, which was the logical first choice, come to think of it. So I ended up using Audition to find the exact time I wanted, then timing it out in Photoshop.

I had only a faint idea of how laughs really went, taking them all for granted as it were, so Youtube came into handy there. Although most of the footage tagged with my search terms were of babies, I could see that, contrary to prior assumption, the mouth did not really change shape with each syllable, and head bobbing was minor. I chose to accentuate the head and shoulder movement (exaggeration, booyah), and moreover recalled the use of a figure 8 motion path for the animation of a laugh in one of them books I read; most likely  the Animator's Survival Kit. I haven't consciously done that figure 8 thing yet so I thought it'd be good to give it a try.

Now I just need to get all this information down on paper. Which will take ages. Which I might not even get done this week because I have another assignment due. Which sucks because I am SO CLOSE to finishing all the character animation for this thing. 

2 MORE SHOTS!

Laugh

The sound component is coming along, if not amazingly. Music is the most done, with Nick coming in to work on it every week, foley I am still putting off as much as possible. Good news however, is I have laughs! Susan kindly organised for me to record her son who is about the right age (and ridiculously adorable to boot). It took me a while to whittle down and mix and match the audio (which mostly consisted of us trying to make him laugh) to a reasonably believable continuous laugh sequence. It didn't help that he had this (ridiculously adorable) sarcastic laugh going most of the time which was short and I could only use the beginning of. Short laughs have a different quality to long laughs I found.