Notes about Class Today

A few housekeeping notes:

#1 Place your homework from Wednesday in the MIDTERMS FOLDER! Your Drawing assignment is due by 12:00 Midnight!
#2 Start compositing your film! I would like to see a current cut of your film by the end of class Wednesday, in addition to the amount of your film that is due!
#3 Review the posts below this one to see everything that is due tomorrow for midterm grading! Next class, you will have a workday, and I will take time to review all of the content you have created so far!

If you were absent, please email me soon and give me an update on your progress. Keep me in the know of how you're doing so I can best know how to help you! Have a nice day everyone! =D

--------------
NOTES FROM ZARK'S PRESENTATION TODAY ARE BELOW!
--------------

Value: Reality: Process:

Goal of career services: Find and lay out early possibilities for you!

• internships: you have 6 credits towards your degree.
• Value of real world experience
• Resume
• Unfortunate parts of reality:
• Entry level jobs also ask you to have experience.
• How do acquire that?
• Multiple possibilities: Internships are one option of it.
• Knowing that the option is out there, you are able to take a couple internships in college so you can have a couple positions in businesses on your resume before you leave college. (generate your own experience)
• Best case scenario:
• Doing a few jobs for different people gives you more options and more experience!
• 10 years post graduation: all the people who did internships advanced faster.
• Doing internships show others what you’re able to do and give you more opportunities to advancement.
• Other Facet of Reality: Boost your professionalism.
• An internship is a step up for helping you with your creative skills and professional development.
• It’s an educational way for you to refine your professionalism outside of school.
• SUPPLY / DEMAND:
• Student: Really demand for learning animation schools.
• Unfortunate side: Memphis TN, No animation industry.
• Despite that reality, there are opportunities!
• What is a creative way around getting industry experience.
• Look at the skills it takes to be an animator:
• Editing
• storytelling
• narrative
• drawing
• storyboarding
• 4-dimensional layout and construction
• (Working with time-based media)
• Prototyping
• Sound acquisition and editing!
• Character design
• Environment design
• texturing.
• These skills are sub components: Any one of these skills are applicable as an animator. They are also useful as an artist outside of animation!
• What places are this used:
• Tv production
• Design and Layout in Architecture
• Storytelling:
• Example: Previous students who worked with Zark.  Bryce Organization:
• Hired animators to design potato chips.
• Why hire animators with industrial space?
• There is a need for visual innovation and creative thinking in EVERY facet.
• More Importantly: The Company HAS A NARRATIVE THAT NEEDS TO BE TOLD.
• That’s important for having animators.
• GETTING THE STORY RIGHT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART for that organization!
• Storytelling is a HUGE skill that is highly marketable to everyone!
• Zark gets asked for 3 things:
• Graphic Designs
• Shoot and Edit Video
• Code for the Web.
• Being able to do even two of these increase your options! 
• There are opportunities to travel. Leave memphis, and score internships and animation positions!
• While you are here, however, take advantage of what you have, and the options you have to boost your skills for the time that comes to make your work stronger!
• Consider these 2 things:
• Develop a sense of where you want to work.
• What makes you you?
• What makes you unique?
• What do you need to apply?
• 1. You need a resume! A good resume!
• An extensive resume is not expected, but you want to have as much work experience you can.
• Resume says something about your education, work experience, 
• Portfolio!
• Elevator pitches!
• A short description of who you are and what you do!
• Build a sense of opportunities and build a profile for yourself!
• Job and internship: Scout the opportunity. Build the profile, write the cover letter that blends your experience, etc!
• IN CAREER DEVELOPMENT:
• Carrie Brooks, and Becca Hart.
• Build steps towards your full narrative!
• Revise your resume
• Work on your ability to write cover letters!
• Show prototypes of your portfolio, resume, and cover letter, to me, jill, etc!
• Who has a website with some of their content on it?
• What can we do to build a sense of opportunities to come up with a list of options and places to help improve your skills!
• GPA 2.6 or waiver, with 45 Credit Hours completed!
• What was the process of application like for internships?
• College: Come to college to know things.
• Leave college to apply them.
• What we appreciate a lot of: Initiative and hustle!
• For everyone to push yourself forward:
• Know what you want to do, where you want to do it, and start looking for ways to do it.
• Find a stepping stone to help build towards it.
• If you have a vision of where you would like to be, it will help you get to where you want to go.

NOTES FROM TODAY'S CLASS:

*note* if you missed class today, we did an in-class exercise that you would need to make up!  Take the time to find one of your classmates and ask about what was covered. Take notes, recreate our assignment, and get caught up to get proper credit! We talked about some great strategies for the next stage of your film!*

These were the notes below on new animation techniques!  I didn't mention this in class, but part of this exercise was to get you to notice the extra character in the scene that has a life, has an attitude, and a personality WITHOUT ME DRAWING A SINGLE DRAWING OF THEM.  Suprised? =D

APPEAL:  (THAT EXTRA 10%)

• What creates Appeal? (Examples)
• Exaggerated movements
• Hand gestures (clear)
• Facial Expressions
• Posture (BodyLanguage)
• How a character communicates.
• Appeal is a vehicle for ANTICIPATION!!!

How do you contextualize other people’s experiences in your own artwork?

YOU DON’T.

• find what’s relatable in your own experiences first
• observe others in action, language, and communication
• use space to add intensity!

ANTICIPATION (Where to add it and when)

• Another way to describe this:  Making one drawing do the work of ten!
• Your goal in this class REVEALED:  Create drawings and art that enhances your ability to communicate with others!  Make precise drawings that correctly conveys a single moment with the most clarity!
• If you can do a single drawing in your entire film that does that, mission accomplished!
• If you can do one, you can do ten, a hundred, a thousand! =D

SQUASH AND STRETCH

• common uses:
• #1 Flexibility - When your character makes contact with something or takes up less space!
• #2 When the character takes up more space or increases it’s speed!
• example: smear frames! http://animationsmears.tumblr.com/

RHYTHM: Manipulating drawings in your art to be enhanced by the medium of TIME.

• to do so: Look at the drawings before and after the drawings in your in-class example!

Homework for Mon, Feb 27th & Wed, March 1st:

Monday:

Next week, we will begin our exploration of post production methods! I realize you have a lot to accomplish in your films, but remember that these are working projects, meaning we can stack goals, and use the art you've created to learn new techniques!

To do so, I need you to accomplish the following:

• Render videos of every scene you have accomplished. Also have a rendered video of your animatic.
• Make a list of audio that you think your scene will need.  The week after next will be our audio production week!
• Create tentative color palettes swatches for your character and environment! The easiest way to do this is to draw your characters and environment in a separate ToonBoom file, or screenshot your art and import it into a new file, but as long as the end result is a clean digital image, I'm okay with you using other software like photoshop, illustrator, and the like.
• You can use this link to get a reminder on how to select swatches and paint your art!

In addition to this, I want you to produce the following:

Based on our in-class instruction, I want everyone to follow these SIX steps:

1. Make a list of these 5 emotions: Joy, Rage, Confusion, Desperation, and Determination.
2. Draw some sketches on what you think would be appealing drawings for these 5 emotions!
3. Take your best sketches and use them to direct a friend to act out these poses for you!
4. Photograph your friend, and draw 5 cleaned-up black and white drawings of these poses! That means ink these drawings traditionally or digitally! Go for realism with animated, dynamic posing that is clear and easy to read!
5. Be sure to capture their likeness to the best of your ability, as well as the clothing they are wearing!
6. (It goes without saying, but lots of clothing that hides the body will make this project harder to do and will make your drawings weaker. If you are drawing people wearing lots of body-hiding clothing, I will expect you to capture the drapery with accuracy!)
7. Bring the photographs, and scanned versions of these drawings to class! I will have a folder for you on the server named "OBSERVATION_DRAWINGS" to add them to!

Extra credit for anyone that does a realistic version of each person and a caricatured version (the caricatured version is extra credit!)

This is to help you boost your appeal and animation posing skills

FOR WEDNESDAY:

On Wednesday, I will need a sample of your work-in-progress film to grade for midterms! I'll use the weekend to give you an overall performance report of your skills, what you do well, what you need to work on, and where to go from there!

In the MIDTERMS FOLDER, I will need the following:

• Your Animatic.
• Your Storyboards.
• Black and White, Cleaned Up, Finalized Environment and Character Designs.
• 18 Seconds of Clean, Cleaned-Up Key Animation!
• Please remember that the original goal for this project was for everyone to be able to produce 18 to 24 seconds of quality, compelling, animation!  I realize projects are at the 30 second range due to pauses, holds, and the like. This is fine! Animation is a process, and this project is designed to have a milestone for the class, and a larger milestone for you to reach outside of it. Turn in your 18 seconds on Wednesday, and you're good to go... for now. ;) This is your chance to catch up and get ahead of the game! Do your best!

Class Cancelled this Monday, 2/20/17!

Hello Everyone,

I hope everyone is doing well! I regret to inform everyone that classes are cancelled today. Please refer to your MCA email for reasons why, and what you should do in the meantime. Your class's part of that message is below.  I look forward to seeing everyone on Wednesday!

But what does this mean for you? Well, consider today a workday. In each of my respective classes, you are working on a much larger project. This gives you time to refine what you currently have and start working on much more improved artwork!

Below are strategies for you to stay caught up and move forward in each class!

AN225: Continue working on your film. Post your schedule and any sequences you have completed to the "2_20 animation and schedules" folder.  I'll review the schedule for completing your film, and give you feedback on your work!  Ideally, this will be the start of the second week of animation production for some of you, and week 2.5 for others.  

By weeks end, everyone wants to have 12 seconds to half of their film animated! Remember to focus primarily on having STRONG key animation. On Wednesday, we'll talk anticipation, squash and stretch, as well as appeal! I have an example for you that should help you find new strategies for animating characters to the best of your ability!

Note: We will start talking audio soon, so please start making a list of sounds and sound effects you think you will need for your film! Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions at all about developing your animation!

-------------------------------

For anyone who is interested in staying caught up and receiving feedback, post snapshots, videos, or samples of what you're working on to the server, email me questions, and I'll be happy to review it and send you an email today. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing everyone on Wednesday!

For anyone who has content they want me to review for the career fair, please post it to the server, and send me an email letting me know what to look for.

For those of you that have scheduled a meeting with me on Monday, that meeting is now cancelled. I'll work some things around to hold meetings during lunch Wednesday as well as my office hours to make up for it. Message me if you need to schedule for another time.

For those of you that would've come to class without your homework today, consider yourself extremely lucky. ;) Use this amazing gift to catch up, write yourself a note to remember all of your art, designs, and materials, and be willing to work extra hard to iron our any wrinkles in your own personal art and production process! We have 3 weeks before spring break, a week and a half before Midterms, and a really good opportunity to finish the first half of the semester in a really good spot. Happy Monday, and work hard, everyone!

Good luck! 

-Shaw

Notes on Workflow:

Workflow Notes from Today, Feb 15th

___________________________________________________

HOMEWORK: Make a PRACTICAL, MANAGEABLE schedule to accomplish making your film by Wednesday, March 8th!

• build this schedule week by week! What will you accomplish every week that will lead to you finishing your film?
• Think of this in terms of seconds of animation, scenes you’re building, or shots you are completing. (Seconds of animation is the best choice for this, as it is VERY specific!)
• Continue working on your animation this weekend!

When building a schedule for your film: Use this terminology:

• define the terms FINISHED vs COMPLETE.
• finished denotes that your film no longer needs improvement. This is similar to perfection, a mostly unattainable goal.
• Instead think of the term, COMPLETE. That is, being able to come up with an idea for a work of art, produce it in a specific amount of time, and have the end result communicate exactly what you want to convey upon production’s end!
• You want to COMPLETE your stories! Have a minimum you want to produce that still accomplishes every goal of your work of art! To do this, create a LIST of the following:
• Have all key animation, drawn and cleaned up. (all actions accounted for)
• Have all beats (changes in action) accounted for.
• Your Strategy for doing so:
• Make a list of every action you have in your story!
• Make a sub list of the MINIMUM number of drawings you need for each action!
• This lets you pick which shots you want to work on, and spend the majority of your time improving your drawing skills!
• Show your work to each other During this process! It will help you and the other person learn more about your individual workflow!
• Have all of your key animation fully colored!
• Make time for a week of Audio and Post production of your story! We will make time in-class for you to learn how to do this, so plan accordingly!
• As you continue working, begin keeping track of how long it takes you to animate a sequence!
• You can make these notes by action,
• …by scene…
• …or by 6-second sequence!
• Use a stopwatch, or make a written note of the time as you’re working to help with this process!

AS AN ADDITIONAL NOTE FOR STUDENTS: For those wanting some additional help to work out some of their challenges with managing stress during school, the first of an 8-week series of Stress Management Seminars starts on Thursday, February 16th, from 7:00 - 7:50!

Hotkeys Reminder:

A reminder of hotkeys to speed up your workflow during our workdays this week!

HOTKEYS REMINDER:

A. BASIC TOOLS:

Select Tool: Hold Command or Option + S

Brush Tool: Option + B

Paint Bucket Tool: Option + I

Dropper Tool: Option + D

Eraser Tool: Option + E

SELECT EVERY STROKE OF THE SAME COLOR:

  “Command + Shift + A”

(HOLD DOWN ANY KEY TO TEMPORARILY SELECT THAT TOOL!)

B.  Navigation:

Zoom in and Out: 1 and 2

Next/Previous Drawing: F and G keys.

Next/Previous Frame:  “.” and “,”

Turn Canvas:  Hold Option and Command + Left Mouse Button

Re-center Canvas: Shift + M

C. Exposures (Drawing Timing)

Extend exposure (increase timing of current drawing): 

• first option: Click the frame you want to extend your drawing to and hit F5.
• second option: Click the drawing itself, hit F5, and type the frame number you want to extend your drawing to.

Increase Exposure: “-“ and “+” keys.

Create new drawing between existing drawings:

• Drawing ——> Create empty drawing, or “Option + Shift + R”

Duplicate Drawings:

• Drawing — — > Create Duplicate drawing or “Option + Shift + D”

Homework for Monday!

Please be advised! We did a very important in-class exercise today on cinematography that will greatly help your shot selection abilities, thereby giving you more drawing options in your films!  Everyone who was in class today received full credit upon completion.  If you were absent, acquire information from a student in class about our drawing assignment BEFORE Monday, and produce your version of our exercise for credit!  This was an assignment we worked on together as a group. You have the choice of working solo, or working together.

• Design your characters! I need a black and white model sheet for the characters in your story! (one model sheet per character!)
• Design your environments! I need one illustration for each environment you showcase in your story!
• Produce an animatic in storyboard pro, export out the movie, and have it ready to show at the beginning of next class!
• Bring your storyboards, your animatic, your storyboard pro file, and any designs for your movie to class!
• On Thursday afternoon, the blog will be updated with video demonstrations of what we will cover next in class! Watch them this weekend if you want to stay ahead!
• RECORD REFERENCE FOOTAGE FOR YOUR SHOTS! Record yourself or a friend doing every action in your scene!  Bring this to class on Monday!

Today we are going to review shot types and camera techniques for storytelling, while continuing work on designing your story! The first half of the class is a review on cinematic storytelling, and the second half will be about designing your story!

For this weekend: keep in mind that, in revising your story, Framed Ink chapter 3 is an excellent resource. It gives a variety of tips for choosing the best shots for your story!

Notes for class today:

When dealing with cinematography, camera work needs to be designed in the same way that we design the look and feel of our characters and environments!

Review this list of basic shot types! You can find multiple resources for these online, as well as inside the pages of Framed Ink!

Ultimately, the purpose of camera angles is to find ways to capture the best action occurring within the story!

• To do so, we have to understand one very important, fundamental rule of storytelling:  The camera is meant to FOLLOW the action of the characters and props within the story, not the other way around.
• Most rookie mistakes with storytelling think of filmaking as a series of "cool camera angles" as opposed to living breathing characters!
• So when you are creating shots for your story, and camera angles for your story, try this:
• Figure out where your characters are supposed to go first.
• Then, figure out which camera angles will best tell the story second!
• Our in-class exercise will help with this today!
  

STORY PROMPT: Our explorer is trying to sneak into a dungeon. Inside the dungeon is a treasure chest. Inside the treasure chest is a diamond. Our hero sneaks into the dungeon room, opens the chest with a key from his/her pocket, and secures the treasured diamond! Our hero leaves before anyone notices!