Assignment-10

This my final animation...

I present you...

"Hickery Dickery Dock" REMAKE

By Nishal Prince

(p.s Sir if you have trouble viewing this assignment then you could view it on student net and/or your email)

ASSIGNMENT-9

Summery of Difficulties encountered:
(Sir you may find that this answers ' What difficulties did you encounter and how did you overcome them' , Howver I have been answering this question as I went).

- I didn't known what to use as a plot for my animation: So I used a nusery rhyme so I know what to do, but as I went I altered the nursery rhyme to fit my situation.

- I saved a few frames as drawing instead of page: So I just undid my work on inkscape and re-exported it as a page.

- Inkscape kept on closing down: I just kept saving every few minutes as I did some work.

- I realised that my animation wasn't going to fit the timing if I only had a minutes and hourly hand on my clock : so i made a seconds hand.

These are the main problems I faces as I worked on my animation... You may have different problems, and to overcome them , you could find some expert online inkscape percon or you could do the easy and smart think and ask you IST teacher, asuming you have a IST teacher.

Assignment-8

Evaluate It:

MY animation (Hickory Dickory Dock- REMAKE) is a quick and simple animation that last about 16 seconds.

I love the out come of my animation, it's pretty smooth with 29 frames/second.

However my only worries are whether my animation is too slow in some places and too fast it others. Other then that my animation has pretty much given me a better result then what i expected. One more thing, Sir the animation on the blog may not work, but i've email it to you and also put it under student work on student net-IST.

What other word then pround can I use to explain the outcome I recieved for my animation and I'm nearly certain that anyone and everyone who has joined me, by following me as I made my animation, could make one just as good, or even better.

-Nishal prince 9IST2
signing off

Assignment-7

Next step is to put my animation together.

(Sir you may find the answers for 'what frame rate were you aiming for' and 'what is the final size of your animation in MB')

Step 4: Make ME A Movie
Well, by know you should have all your frames in one file ready to go. Simply open the file, click on the first image and click Ctrl-A to select all the frames.

Have a movie maker project open and pull the frames into movie maker.

Then again press Ctrl-A to select all the images and go to view, then type a very small time in. I think the everage time for my images were 0.15 seconds however I do have some frames going for a longer or a shorter period of time.

Then when you're happy with you timing and order of frames you go to file, save movie, for a computer- find where you want to save it then click save. wait for it to load and TADA your done.

I was aiming my animation to be around 10 frames/second. I right clicked on my animation and went to it's properties where I found out that my animation is 29frames/second.YAY:):):). There it also states the size of your file, mine is a total of 1.04 MB. Not bad.

Watch you animation a few times and let me tell you, it's surely a proud throught to realise that YOU , yes YOU created that. :):):)

The next few blogs are going to summerise my problems encountered and show you my video, keep reading...

Assignment- 6

Step 3: Frame ME
What exactly is my animation other then a whole lot of frames and to create MY animation it took me around 100 frames.

(Sir you'll find the answer to two questions " What image format were you saving you work in during the development of the frames' and 'What image format did you save you frames as')

Exporting Frames:
To export frames I put my cartoon vector images onto the same inkscape file and positioned them in the places I visioned them in.

To export you frames you simply need to go to file then scroll down to 'export bitmap'. Once the tab is opened you need to brouse and find the place you want to place your fames,as well as name your first frame. Then you simply move you vector images as bit more and slightly change the frame name, then export agin, repeat this process to export your frames.  Oh and Vital thing, when you export your frames make sure you export the page every time, not anything else.

In our animation the clock seconds hand ticks every 5 seconds in every frame along side the movement of the ding dong thing and the mouse coming in. Then the mouse sees the chees to the top of the clock and the frames then shift to the image of the mouse thinking of the cheese. Then we see the mouse climbing up the clock, Once the mouses reached the top he starts eating the cheese. to get this effect I used the Bezier tool to draw small clouds completely in the colour of white then dupilate them and place them on top of the cheese as the mouse moves accross eating the cheese.

Then I again go to some frames of a close up of the mouse. As the mouse talks then goes to sleep. back on top of the clock the mouse is asleep, ans a frame at a time the z's appear.

Then the clock stricks 1pm which wakes the mouse up. Then I slightly move accross the clock as the mouse starts to come down the clock. and leads itself out of the image.
During the development of these frames I saved them as a '.svg' file (aka. vector image- made up of shapes)). So that when I retured to work on my images I could simply open it up and move the images with ease. However as I made my frames I saved them as '.png' ( which is a bitmapped images- made up of pixels). This is because standard animations are usualy made with bitmaped imaged.


Keep reading to Know How I put together my images to create my animation...

Assignment- 5

Continuing with Step 2: Draw Me Ready
The clock:
Ok, like all my other images I got a bitmapped image of the internet, of a cartoon grandpa clock, to draw easily. Ther when I thought about it my whole clock doesn't move around. All i needed as a vector image to move around was the handles and the ding dong thing on the bottom (not sure what it's really called). Anyway, I drew that separatly and hopes that  I could just place it on top to move around.

Then I was struck by my other problem. It's not coloured in and my solution to that was to take it into paint and colour it in. I got it coloured however I realised that it looked a bit messy. then I came up with my next solution to use ink scape to creat and out line for the clock, little did I realise that I was pretty much drawing my grandpa cloak even though I thought I would be easier not to.  So guess what I ended up donin more work then i intened to do. eaith way i still didn't have a moving clovk hace or ding dong thing, so I started to make my own.

The ding dong thing:
Easy to do and done with a few minutes. I got the circle tool to create and ovel shape which I was ro use as the  background of the ding dong thing. I filled it in black and make sure the strock colour's black as well, you would already know how to do that if you had read my last post so i'm no telling you.

Then I traced the ding dong thing on the bitmaped images and just made it a bit more curved on the edges. I made sure the colour was white and I was done as soon as I placed it in position.

The clock face:
To do this I simply drew a large white cirle over the originagl bitmaped circle.and drew a smaller white circle, with a dark stroke to place in the center. Then I clicked on the tool that looks like an A to 'create and edit text objects'.

I typed up each number (1-12) seperately to place around the face of the clock. Then well... I placed the numbers in order aroung the face of the clock and groupes them to the clock face. By going to 'Object' (on the tool bare at the top, in the row along side file) then scrolling down to press group, when i want them seperate I just ungroup them, under group.

Once I had all that ready all I was missing was the clock handles. I drew the hour and the minute handle soon to find out that I was going to mess up my frames and concept for this animation if i didn't have a seconds handle. So i drew a seconds handle.

So now I have my mice from different angles and my clock, all I needed was something to be my mouse's motive to climbe up the clock, and what better then a good piece of chese. Because the cheese wasn't going to do any major movement I simple got a nice pretty, yellow bitmaped cheese picture from google images.

Next step is to make my frames for my animation... keep reading to find out how...

Assesment-4

Ok I promised to tell you how I made my animation, and well, I keep my promises. So let's move onto the next step.

Wait a minute.. before you do any work on inkscpe. you need to go to file, then document properties and click on the checked pattern to get rid of the transperancy on the page, and if you want add another colour as the background. Oh, and don't forget to set the right size for your canvas. For my purposes I make my canvas 600 by 600 pixels.

Step 2: Draw Me Ready
To get my animation I needed to make frames, and to make frames I need characters in them, to move around, and well unless we somehow found magic in this world, we have to draw them.

I'd say out of this whole task drawing the animation would have been the most time consuming. First we have to get the images you found and put them into inkscape. Then we get the bezier tool. You could use this great tool to simple click on the lines you want to trace and double click to finish. Tada you just traced your image. Well it may not look exactly like the image you traced but with a bit of work you'll barely be able to tell the difference.

Ok, you might think it looks a bit pointy at the moment, but trust me with the help of the nobe tool (which says 'edit paths by nodes' when you put your mouse over it). What does this funny looking tool do? you may ask. Well lucky you came to me cause I know.

Try clicking on the image traced and guess what, a whole bunch of little squares apear, and you know whats weird their exactly where you clicked to trace the image. I'd drawn all my other images but i left the mice's tail to showyou how I did it. Click on one of the squares and hold down shift as you click the other points you want to smooth out. Once you have all the right sections selected you'll relise that on the top end (not exactly at the very top but at the top, why bother explaining when I cain show you), yeah right there (look at the following image).

That's right there you'll see some curved symols with similar squares in the center of them and if you want to draw and image just click on that with the square you want to curve selected.


As you can see. I did just that for the tail that i wanted to give my mouse.


And once you have that done you're ready to add some colour into this plain thing to get it to look exactly like how you want it to. To colour you simply right click over the image and chose 'fill and strock'.

Tell you a trick, after geting yoiu strock the right tickness and colore you want you just got to go down to the colours on the bottom and select the one you want to fill. There are like fifty different colours there, nearly all shades and colours.

For the purpose of my mouse I choose a grey colour, to give it a micy look.

I had gone through the same process with all the view of my mice but as it comes to my clock it has a bit of a different twist.

Keep reading to explore IST with N.P ( said " explore IST with N dot P)...

 These are screen shots of some of my creation process of the mouse from the from view:

Assignment-3

(Sir you'll find anwers to another question in here ' Describe what software you used and why you chose it')

Ok, well.. instead of jumping ahead, to tell you how exactly I had made my animation; I'll tell you what software I used.

You all must have heard of inkscape, and if haven't it doesn't matter cause i'll tell you, all about it. Well... Inkscape, what a wonderful software, it alows anyone and everyone to draw, move and export images with a few simple clicks here and there. Without this magnificant software, the animation I made with a few short hours would take me at least ten times more time.

The beauty of Inkscape is the fact that it recognizes images as shapes or figures and well, the other softwares we love and know (aka. paint) don't, they see what's on the page as a whole bunch of pixels and well it just happens that my hard work is way more then a whole bunch of pixels.

So what I'm trying to say is that I used inkscape to creat the 100 frames to make my simple animation. With some help from 'windows movie maker' to put it together with the right timing and order.

Save yourself all the extra hours with the classic and easy to use Inkscpe and movie maker.

Continue reading, couse we all know you want to...

Assignment-2

I know I said that I was going to do a teddy animation, but as I was searching for teddy images I saw a very simple looking mouse and I thought well, wouldn't it be easy if I decide to do a mouse animation- remake of Hickery Dickery Dock.

Follow me for the next few blogs to learn how I made my animation:
(P.S Sir this is a question being answered, 'Describe the creation process')

Step 1: Find suitable images. A svg file (aka. vector image) would do a treat for animation, but because it's difficult to find the perfect vector image, you could simply get a simple bitmaped image and trace the different shapes of the image to create the figure.

For my animation I needed, a mouse from the front view, a mouse from the side view, a clock (preferably a grandpa clock) and a piece of cheese. It wasn't to hard for me to find very simple and doable bitmaped mice on google images. I picked the ones I loved the best and saved it ina a file for my IST assignment. Another advantage of choosing to do simple bitmapped images of mice, is the fact that I get to decide which parts I want to have seperate and how simple I want to make it.

So far I only found the images I prefer, but continue reading to know how I end up with my final report...

Assignment

The next Ten blogs will be in regard with my IST assignment. through these blogs you will follow me as I make a short animation. it's my first time so I may encounter difficulties.

I have three ideas to make an animation:
1. To have a person traveling all over Australia visiting all the big things
2. To have person living in a place with no greenery, and deciding to try creating/growing a tree
3. Following the teddy bear song and have a teddy bear performing all the actions.

1. TO difficult and is going to take a lot of different images and frames.
2. May or may not be to hard, however will need many differnt images.
3. Probably the easiest and I only really need the teddy as my focus.
Option number 3 it is...

Follow the next tofew blogs as i go through the prosess of creating my animation :):):)

Fingers crossed... :)

Inkscape- test video (bounce all the way)