Not On the List

I participated (by force) in the 11 Second Club November 2012 competition for the next assignment.  The audio had really weird dialogue.  It was hard to come up with a story for it.  Rough storyboards:

Le teacher wanted me to add more camera angles, so I did. (Even though the vast majority of the 11-second-club clips don't change angles.)  I think it looks better now.

First, I neglected to check the guidelines and therefore my aspect ratio was fullscreen instead of widescreen.  So, with 1.5 hours until the deadline, I changed the size (using command + J) but doing this made some random lines disappear from some of the frames, and some of the frames had nothing showing up in them.  So I resaved the file, and copied the frame from the fixed file and pasted them to the resized file.  But the frames I pasted were now the original fullscreen size.  So I resized those as best I could.  Then, since the canvas gained a lot of width, the backgrounds weren't big enough (they cut off about 3/4 through each frame because I only drew enough for fullscreen.  So I filled in the background.  Then I kept having to re-render the video after finding mistakes in the animation.

I really wish there were another file format to export to because Quicktime stinks.  The audio quality drops severely even though the "No Compression" option is used. BAH!!

After critique, I added some movement after the "BAM!" to his hands.

Here is the fullscreen version:

When I tried the default codec, some of the frames froze during playback when I uploaded it to Youtube.  I dried h.264, and now the frames run fine, but there are a lot more artifacts showing up during playback.  So then I tried messing with the "Animation" codec's settings, and got it to show up decently.

Horton Hears a Croc

Next assignment - use one of the clips from here and interpret the dialogue your own way and animate that.  I chose "Mr. Mayor, are you seriously proposing that we spend the Who centennial on the ground? Like worms?!" I selected a crocodile to be my narrator so I could make his mouth go crazy (as opposed to a character with a flat face on which the mouth sits and moves)

Original storyboards:

The character blocking I did before I started animating can be found here - After critique, I redid the part in which the crocodile yells "ground" - He was redirecting the viewer's attention to the bottom-left of the screen by shoving his hands over there when the focus is always on the right side of the screen.

Here is the final version-

The audio didn't render very well, and it also rendered out of sync- either that, or my animation itself was slightly off with the audio - That can be fixed by moving all of the frames back one space.  Also, I didn't make it so that he emphasized certain syllables with his mouth.  I made it so his mouth opens about the same width throughout every word.  This can be fixed by following the instructions found here.

I accomplished the snappiness I wanted from the animation, but I think some of the movements were a bit fast - I also had a problem with twinning in the first half of the animation and didn't realize it until Jessie pointed it out.  (Thank you friend!)  So the second half contains less twinning with the hands.  I also think the cat's arm movement is awkward right after he jumps.

On the plus, I animated the spit coming out of the croc's mouth quite well I thought