Our second project marked our first proper lecture with Tony (a brilliant animator who has worked on Danger Mouse, a cartoon my fellow student and I keep close to our hearts), which was for the entire class to collaborate on a morphing animation. For a 2nd project this was a good decision, since the student were still getting to know each other, this would allow us to become more acquainted with one another, while also testing and improving some basic interaction and co operating skills, vital in professional animating.
The process itself was straightforward enough. Create an image of anything we wanted, duplicate it, and hand the copy to the student to your right. Once we had our original drawing, and the duplicate of the students drawing, we were told to morph the other students image into our own in no more that 17 frames. These steps were done in the Tuesday morning lecture, which meant we also had the benefit of having Tony on hand to give us advice and answer our questions, which proved useful throughout the day. We also had access to the film school's light-boxes (and the windows when all the boxes were in use) which made this traditional process give higher quality duplicates.
For my image, I chose a simple design of a cat sitting down, nothing to complex and relatively easy to morph into something else, and the duplicate I received was one of a cupcake. I saw that most of the other student were changing the entire shape to create the new image, which was exactly was was expected out of our morphing animation, but I wanted mine to have some variation from the others. I decided that in the 17 frames, I would zoom in on the cherry on top of the cupcake, and then have the cherry turn and morph into the Cat, then fall and sit down. There was no real 'inspiration' for this particular project, the stem of cherry on top reminded me of a cats tail, which then lead to my choice of morphing it this way.
As for the technical aspect of this project, there were a few mishaps and confusion, this was primarily due to no one knowing what we were suppose to do with our frames after creating them. We were only given instructions to bring them in on the following Friday (which my brain processed as 'sleep in, and drop them off at the school in the afternoon, which should only take a few minutes'...how wrong I was), and not to work on them at home. When I arrived Friday, I discovered that we were meant to scan them in, and then colour and put it together in Flash. Unfortunately both scanners were already in use, and Tony was occupied with the second year, which meant I couldn't ask him to instruct me on using flash. Due to these reason I decided to do the scanning and editing work on Tuesday, I did feel bad about not doing the animation that day, but only a handful had shown up on the Friday to do it, so the absence of my animation on the mac went unnoticed. It was rather intimidating working solely on Flash for the first time, but after being shown how to create the animation, I found it wasn't as hard as I had imagined, and even rather fun. Some of the processes on flash were similar to that on Photoshop, and so it wasn't a complete stranger to me/
I was very happy with the result. After working with basic editing software for so long it was great to work on flash and knowing how to get the job done. It was the first time I truly felt that I was creating a good quality animation.
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