Woohoo done!

Comments... hmm where to start....

- I think I got about 80% of how I envisioned it. Definitely not perfect but I'm actually pretty pleased with what I got.

- Normally I'm a pretty humble person (no, not really.. :P) but I have to say my own jokes made me laugh (even when I'm stuck watching it a billion times).

- That being said, I think it's probably worth breaking my back over it... and my neck...and my bruised hip. With an 18-hour flight on Tuesday, I think I'll be sleeping for the rest of the week.

- Overall it was fun. It made me want to wake up and work on it 20hours a day, not because of my neck that's killing me preventing me to sleep. :P Still, I enjoyed it.

- Have to admit the best part of it for me was making all the crap. Thinking back in my undergraduate years in architecture I would be bored with building models and start making irrelevant crap just for fun. How irrelevant? Here's an example:
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(note: I didn't build that model, just the hangman. And oh, that was at work, oops.) Now I can make all the irrelevant stuff I want without being scold and say, "I'm doing work!" How cool is that! Not really, but it's self-entertaining. :D

- I so want to get a SLR camera, why can't I win the Mega Million? I've managed to get through the term with only a digital camera. I actually do have a crappy handycam that doesn't work with stop motion software, so not only did I survive(?) (hopefully) the term with a digital camera I did it without stop motion software. Not the best of choices but I'll live with what I've got. For all the shakiness and lightning flashes, I blame the camera for being smart.





More animation comments:

- Overall, the tempo is really fast. Rabbits are agile, wait what?

- Drawing something on paper/computer is a lot easier than making something happen in stop motion. "And then it flies across the screen..." should really rethink these things, much much much easier said than done. At the end the coolness of it doesn't really match up to the work behind it. I ended up changing a couple of my storyboards making it more feasible and less Photoshoping.

- 3D setbacks, not happening.

- The initial outdoor shot was supposed to be snowy, but I ended up naming it "Spring" also it wouldn't seem as 'intense' if it were two months before Easter.

- Outdoor shot was really hard to shoot and animate. Lighting- Any darker it would of blurred out, any lighter the contrast would be too strong. I had to animate the ending shot backwards because of my fat fingers tight spacing and tiny characters.

- Fading light was difficult without the ability to set my camera.

- Out of time constraints and laziness I didn't really want to expand my set which would take several additional hours for it to dry. I worked around it by changing the angle of the light which probably doesn't read. It was kinda hard to get the shadow effect, wish I had a flashlight.

- I cut the originally planned cuts where he walks in and takes off his bandit mask.
1. I don't like doing walks He doesn't have feet, amputated. Sorry.
2. I would have had to expand my set.
3. His head is really huge, no way that tiny apron would go on top down = more trouble for me. Also his hands can barely move.
So
I decided to go with another part of his back story (him being a painter) and incorporating the title in addition to establishing the shot.

- Wasn't really planning this from the start, but what better way could there be to do the credits and titles from the paintings?
Allowed or not, it would be pretty crappy if somebody asked and I would say, "Oh, that's not stop motion. (Wait isn't this a stop motion piece?)" So even though I thought about it, I decided against it and I can say it's all stop motion! :D

...or maybe I just got a kick out of painting with those little brushes and wanted to show it...
(Horrible planning on writing "STOry" hahaha...)

- I did the credits before doing the sound. Damn. Didn't want to go through copyright issues and bother having to credit every source, so I went through more trouble of getting all the sounds myself. The quality, not so great but I guess it works.



- More changes.
*Originally the cow was supposed to pat the chick on the head. Pretty impossible considering the very short arms.
*It was supposed to get messy, couldn't think of a nice touch to make it happen as planned. Violence prevails.



comments that you might not want to know (you should watch the video before reading this):

- I busted the chick's left eye. The more I fix the worse it looks. I also poked a pin right through the skin of my thumb during the process.

- Outdoor shot. There's a dent on the cow's head. I believe that's the part where my camera fell in and knocked the brains out.

- My battery died right after the chick poked the egg. I didn't want to reshoot the section that I reshot 4 times already so I tried to work around it by using a close up shot (well the CU was originally planned) but that was about as close I could get with the camera. I can't do zooms so that's kinda why the 3 cuts happened.