I unfortunately managed to miss the entire two hour tutorial yesterday but managed to catch up fairly well today animating our fat kaiser character thanks to Lisa and her very detailed hand out.

I came up with a few ideas for my pitch a while ago but as of last week have decided to go with a light hearted approach on my themes of life, loss and friendship.

The style will be a blend of children's drawings, stick figures, anime and Disney. Now all I have to do is get the images from my head to the page and some days are better than others for this.

I started my story board at the end of last week and I already know what my main shots will be so it's on to developing my characters.

Week 1: New and Scary

Well where do I begin? At the start I suppose. We have just finished our second tutorial of the first week. This is the first time I have actually created anything in Flash and I have to say I was scared about starting this course. I thought that every one else would know what they were doing and I wouldn't but after today's studio session I am begining to feel more confident.



In Tuesday's tutorial we learnt how to make a basic stick figure wave and then I attempted to make a second 'evil' figure kick, which was amusing. It wasn't brilliant but it was fun and I learnt a lot, for example the short cuts which I am already using for everything so I'm trying to take as many notes as I can during classes.



In today's tutorial we animated a ball, making it bounce across the screen. Below is my animation from class. I even managed to make the ball more relaistic by squashing it as it lands and stretching it in the frame just after it bounces, quite proud of my self.

Yesterday we had our first lecture for the course where guest speaker Brodie McCrossin Animation Director from People's Republic of Animation showed us several clips and short animated films. There was one clip that stood out to me, which was the Panda flying away. I thought it was amazingly well done and so effective for such a short clip.