Craig Phillips - Midterm Project

Midterm Project

Storyboard

Kuler Color Scheme

Building:

I began by creating the starry background. This was accomplished with a black stage with a white spraypaint tool. I turned on the random scaling to give the sky a speckled, semi-realistic look. It was easy but worked really well. I can even see some faux-constellations in the sky I created.

I then started on the astronaut, as he's kind of the main focus of the project. He was really fun to draw. I used the paintbrush and paint bucket for pretty much all of him. I started with his head and torso, since I knew that other than rising into the foreground, he would otherwise be stationary. I drew the two arms separately from the rest of him, because I knew that at the end of the project I would have him raise his hands up in fear of the "approaching" supernova.

I did the spaceships, asteroid and supernova next. They were pretty fun, since I could take some creative liberties with their designs. I used the shapes tool and line tool for most of "spaceship1" and the pen tool and some shapes for "spaceship2". I used the paintbrush and paint bucket for the asteroid and supernova.

I imported the alien and scaled him down so that it would be (at least mildly) feasible that he could stand on the asteroid as it flew by the astronaut's view.

For the text, I just picked the cleanest font I could find.

I only used one symbol from a prior project, which was the alien creature. I pretty much only modified his scale and placed him on a layer underneath the asteroid to give the appearance that he's peeking over the side of it to glance at the astronaut. All of the other symbols are new, created specifically for this project.

Animations:

I used a simple motion tween to raise the astronaut (and his arms) from the bottom of the stage into the foreground, between where the text would appear.

I tweened the alpha on the text, so that it would fade in and eventually fade out (after a rise into the foreground), so that it wouldn't take up too much of the screen, while the more important visual actions occurred. I also changed the brightness very rapidly toward the end with the astronaut (and his arms) and the supernova to give the appearance of its blast radius hitting him (kind of in old-school video game form). I did this frame-by-frame because it was just easiest to insert the keyframes and use the color transformations to affect it frame-by-frame.

I used custom easing on the text fade-out (very subtly, because it wasn't super-necessary but a nice addition) by tweaking the Bezier Curve in the motion editor to get the text to fade slowly at first and then much quicker before disappearing completely. The motion editor is pretty easy to use, but as mentioned during class, if you're working on anything but a large monitor, it is very frustrating to have to either scroll around a lot or adjust your windows. It's pretty handy, though, and if my project was longer and more detailed I probably would've used it more.

I used the classic tween on "spaceship2" (the paper-airplane-esque one). It was appropriate because it was a simple animation that looked better with a little curve (to give a silly nod to a real paper airplane's loopy motion), so I used a motion guide layer to create the curve that the spaceship traveled on and oriented it to the curve so that the nose of the craft faced the direction that it was traveling.

My nested tween was the animation of the alien waving from behind the asteroid as they hurdled across the screen.

Comments/review:

I still have trouble with the pen tool, but since I only used it on "spaceship2", it was useful to create the odd shape without having to try and draw it and "straighten" it out, which sometimes doesn't work as intuitively as I thought.

I love messing with the paintbrush. It's so simple and with the right mouse (or if I had some expendable income, a tablet), I can create a lot of cool stuff that it kind of smooths out and stylizes for me.

The motion editor, as mentioned above, was only used with the text and so wasn't a big problem. I'm pretty comfortable with it, though, and would use it more if the project were bigger and more detailed. Maybe for future projects or the final I'll do some in-depth motion editing.

That's pretty much it! All in all, it was the funnest project yet. I love creating all the shapes and symbols from scratch. I'm stoked to mess with IK and shape-tweening now.