Spinning Out

Today I changed the colour of my flying object to being pink, instead of a dark brown. I think it now stands out much more than what it used to. I also started working on the explosion that occurs when the object hits my fish. It gradually gets bigger, just like what a real explosion would look like and I thought it looked really good when I had finished! 

Both the scenes of the explosion and the scene where my fish is spinning out because it gets hit, kind of fade into one another if that makes sense. I slowly started turning the colours of the explosion until they made a spinning vortex. Here's a picture of what the vortex looks like, except it will be spinning.

Next lesson I'm hoping to add the fish into the middle of the votex and make it have 'X' eyes to symbolise that it's unconscious. The next scene of my animation will then be the fish awakening and realising it has lost its colour.

Hit!

Today I continued working on the scene my fish ventures out into the reef and then finished it! I just needed to make the fish swim into the middle of the screen, make the seaweed in the background sway back and forth in the current and then have the piece of debris spin into the middle and hit the fish on the head (resulting in the fish losing its colour). Looking at the debris now, I think I might have to change its colour to a colour being a bit more vibrant. This is because at the moment its a little hard to spot it out with due to it being in front of the dark seaweed.  

Fish venturing out

Today I started working on the scene when my fish ventures out from where it is sleeping, into the open to check out the storm. I found that drawing everything apart from the fish in the background was easier that drawing everything in the foreground. This is because when I go to highlight a certain object, I don't highlight a heap of other random drawings that I don't want highlighted and it save heaps more time :)

Storm!

Yay I finally finished animating my sunset! This lesson was a little interrupted because of all the school tours coming in and out of the classroom but I still got a reasonable amount of work done. I finished changing the colour schemes for the sunset as well as starting the beginning of the storm that results in my main fish losing its colour. I only got up to having the lightning flash over the reef, but tomorrow I'll hopefully finish this scene and be ready to move onto the next.

I'm finding it really annoying how the boarder of the frame is always in the way! There are just random lines going down the sides of my animation and I want to find out if I can get rid of them.

Sunset Continued

Today I just carried on making the sun set over the ocean. This scene was actually way harder than I planned it on being! This is because as the sun got darker, I tried making the sky and reef get darker as well. To do this I had to individually colour every brush stroke which took ages! Next lesson hopefully I can keep working at a bit of a faster speed.

Sun setting:

Sunset

To transition to my next scene, I'll have a quick sunset over the water and then the dark storm clouds will roll in bringing lots of lightning and rain. I didn't get to finish this scene today but I will next lesson. This is what the scene looks like with the sun still high up in the sky.

Scene 1

I finished off scene 1 of my animation today by drawing some bright and colourful schools of fish to also be swimming in the background while the main fish swims past. I thought it looked really effective because I drew two schools of the same fish, but arranged their colours differently and then made them swim into the scene at different times, so they sort of criss-crossed each other. Here is what this scene looked like with one school of fish.

Animating Starts

Today I finally got to start animating! Since last year, I've missed animating and using Animationish, because I can just zone out and focus on what I'm working on in a peaceful and calm way. I started off today by drawing the reef that the fish (who loses its colour) and some other fish are swimming in, to give the viewer a good idea of whereabouts the story might be set. I found it difficult to figure out how to move the tail properly so the fish would look like it was swimming, but I finally got over this and made it swim. Here is a screenshot of what I got done this lesson. Next lesson I'm planning on drawing some schools of bright and colourful fish swimming past in the background.

Storyboard Finished!

Here is my final story board for my animation:

4. 

Storyboard Lesson Continued ...

Here are the next two planning sheets for my story board:

2.

3.

Storyboard Lesson

Today in class, I started working on the story board for my animation. Here is the first page of what I have so far:

1.

My Idea

I thought of an idea! So for my animation, I think I'm going to follow the story of something along the lines of this:

So my main character will be a fish living in the great barrier reef and one night, a huge storm passes over the reef he lives in and he is separated from his family. But to make matters worse, he has lost his colour! So now he is a grey fish living in amongst all of the other colourful fish, so he becomes really upset. He decides that he can no longer go on living as a grey fish so he sets out into the world to try and regain his colour. After every place he visits he manages to regain one spec of his colour, so after he visits several places, he becomes even more colourful than he ever was before! He finally returns back to his reef and he is so colourful that nearly all the other fish seem boring with their single colours! So its a happy ending :)

I'll probably add heaps to that story line and change it around over time but that's the basic structure I think. I also might have some music playing in the background to give it more emotion for different parts of the animation.

Animations!!!

I'm so excited for this term!! In year 8, making animations was one of my work highlights for the year because I got to think of a story and then make it into an animation, which I thought was pretty cool! So when Mr Powell told us we were going to be making animations over the next 2 terms, I got really excited because having 2 terms means I can put lots of work into an animation and hopefully get a well-deserved outcome! 

I'm not too sure what I will animate at the moment, but I'm going to try and incorporate at least one other element like Photoshop or iStopmotion along with Animationish.

This term, I also want to make sure I always update my blog after every lesson we have. This is because last term I didn't always update my blog as much as I probably could have. And it won't be very fun if I put heaps of effort into my animation and not too much effort into my blog because then at the end of the project, I won't have the overall grade I was aiming for.

Happy Animationing!