Time to Animate!

Alright, i've got all the tools that I need to begin animating. I only need to choose a song to animate to. There's an artist by the name of Kevin Macleod, who shares royalty free music on the internet for anyone to use for their purposes. He only asks that you donate money to his continuing contribution. He writes some fairly good tunes, even some Jazz. I'll have a piece selected soon, he has a lot of cool stuff to go through first.

Kevin's site can be found here: http://incompetech.com/

I'm bad at posting

I'm very bad at remembering to post in a timely fashion, it probably frustrates all of you a bit. Anyways, on Friday I found some tutorials on basic flash animation. The you tube channel is DrawWithJazza- the URL: http://www.youtube.com/user/drawwithjazza?feature=results_main - I've begun downloading my trial version of Adobe Flash Studio and will be taking a crack at it with my tablet later today and on Monday. Hopefully I can get the basics down within the next week or so. If I have any samples, I'll post them with some more music.

-Until next week

Progress!

Yesterday I obtained some photos and some clips in class that I can use to help me animate the background figures I'm going to be using. I've got the base photo for a trombone, snare and cymbal set, cello and piano. I still need to gather more short clips to use as tool-tips for my animation, such as walking animations, pool shots and other various actions you'd find in a romanticized bar scene. Progress is coming along, just need to keep gathering photos and start the rough sketches on Photoshop. Wish me luck.

Sum Songs and Other Stuff

Today I dropped by Aaron Brother's art and frames to grab a sketchbook that is going to be dedicated wholly and entirely to this project. Any sketches or thumbnails I'm going to have are going to be in there. So far I've learned how to draw expressions and basic bodies. Next it's specific characters.

Music selection is going well, I've been listening to a lot of blues and bebop on Pandora Radio and have been writing artists down that I'm interested in using. I've got some links on some stuff- Some of the stuff is even Japanese, and is pretty dang good.- here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6jCJZEFIto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F5459jCtuM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1n4yr4SmA4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09BB1pci8_o

Lastly, set pieces that I'm going to have to draw: Bars, alleyways, car chases, office scenes and all the clothing/styles of the 40's to boot. I'm having difficulty finding good representations of 1940's mafia styles so if you find any good ideas, be sure to let me know!

I may be setting my heights too high on this project so I don't want to bum you guys out if the animations are choppy or if my project turns out differently. I just want to make sure I'm really pushing myself.

A Little Late. Nonetheless: Theme

The other day I decided upon a musical genre to base my animation off of. The style? Bebop and smooth jazz. The theme of the animation? Mafia, New York and the craziness we all like to associate with that time. There's going to be bar music, thug music and a wordless story to the animation. It's all about the music after all! Character designs and scenery sketches will come as I find more reference pictures.

Time For Thumbnails

Alright, I've decided to take the highroad and challenge myself. I'm going to be animating a video and setting it to tracks of music. I'll be spending time creating animation thumbnails and then pairing music to the thumbnails to determine how long each section will be between the two and so on. I'll be doing this between every picture, again, and again and so on. I'll be doing all this until I have a basic reference for what I'll be animating. Right now I'm brainstorming ideas in a thumbnail journal of sorts. When I have a more comprehensive idea of what I'll be drawing I'll post a couple of thumbnails from it. What size do you guys think the thumbnails should be? Full 8/11 size?

Sketchy Beginings

For this year's Google project, I'm going to be learning how to create both a time lapsed video recording of multiple pieces of art, and how to create a basic animation and set it to a soundtrack. My first goals for this project is to map out with tumbnail sketches the basic layouts of my works, will these sketches I'll be able to envision an atmosphere and start hunting for appropriate music to accompany the video. There's a lot of prep to be done before the actuall project gets underway it seems!