Week 1 Comments

This first full week of Digital Media sure was fun. I was very excited to join the class and after this past week, I am very glad I did. I'm also very excited for the future when we learn more advanced things like frame by frame animation and 3D animation in Maya. But now onto what we learned this week. This week we learned the basics of drawing in Toon Boom Animate Pro which I came to like very much. In Addition we also learned the history of animation, all about computers and different jobs in the industry. The thing that frustrated me the most this week is trying to learn how to render a frame in Animate Pro. For those who don't know what I mean by this, a Rendered shot or animation is what the final version will look like. The reason I wanted to learn how to do this is because I wanted to see what my projects would look like in much better quality than Animate Pro can allow while using the program. But after looking all over the tool bars, I finally figured out how to do it! 

For those interested you go to Play - Render and Play and than move to Time bar to Frame one. 

It's the difference between this....

And this!

It may be a little hard to notice the difference at first (and granted my example isn't great because there's no detail in the background). But if you look carefully you will notice that the second image ( the rendered one) is much more clear and crisp, and also gives you a much better representation of what the final product will look like. 

Sorry for rambling about rendering let's talk about what made me happy now. What made me happy this week was learning how great my personal tablet really is on Animate Pro. I'm not great on drawing on a tablet and I will be the first to admit that. But the drawing tools on Animate Pro are seriously awesome and it works almost perfectly on my bamboo tablet.

Now onto my link of interest. For my first one I chose a clip from one of Richard Williams Animation Survival kit DVDs.

Richard Williams is the author of The Animation Survival kit and is a fantastic animator who's work you might have seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. This video while quite humorous, is also very informative on the importance of different walk cycles between different characters. Thank you for reading my first real blog post, and I look forward to making more posts in the future!