aarg

I only just figured out how to log on again, last week it didn't accept my griffith student email and the password retrieval thing didn't work, i just spent an hour trying different passwords, eventually it accepted one i'd tried before. have i mentioned that i think blogs, along with spam, are the scourge of the internet? When I try to look something up so often the search engine presents me with some vague reference to what I want to know more about on some idiot's blog. I think blogs should be illegal.

Now that that's out of my system, last week in preproduction class (week 3), as best as I can recall, we looked at cinematic storytelling and the importance of storyboarding. We looked at the the technique of changing the angles of a dull shot to make it more interesting, but not too much as to distract the viewer from what's going. Up or down shots can be used to make one character seem large or smaller than another, even if they obviously aren't, for instance when Burns talks to his lawyers in the Simpsons and the camer angle is from behind and blow him, so even though he is seated and they are standing his head is slightly above theirs. We went over the rule of thirds again, which is things in groups of three are visually pleasing. Also examined was picture flow, the essence of which is that dynamic elements strongly influence impact. We looked at bipack backgrounds, backgrounds looped together in continuing way, which can be effective ways of saving animation or just creating cool effects. Mark mentioned the necessity of scanning things at various resolutions and linking them together, I would like to try this in Flash some time where vectors should make this process easier.

Yesterday (wednesday week 4), Mark went over the importance of strong silhouettes. It is a simple principle but I hadn't really thought about it before, and I immediately thought of various Disney films and how they must always be thinking about this, and various Japanese animations where they go after realistic animation rather than an exaggerated, distorted movements, and silhouettes are not quite as important (but still present). We were briefed on Overlays and Underlays, which in cel animation would be an important consideration. In Flash I've never really thought about it because you can easily swap layers around as you see fit but now I know the proper terminology for it anyway. Speaking of terminology, I heard the phrase "Lycer Reel" for the first time, which means animatic. I don't know who this Lycer is but animatic seems to make more sense.

Always design for flexibility, as in, when designing backgrounds, think about whether the background may be able to be used again. This mode of thought favours standard camera angles and settings that you'll use again again, I guess you can apply the principle to props as well, background characters even. Reuse as often as possible!

Do not converge eyelines, as in have lines in the background run through a characters eyes, as it diverts attention from the focal point, usually the eyes. Also avoid diagonals coinciding with lines of cheeks, but broadly try not to parrallel lines of the characters and the backgrounds run close together.

Mark spoke about being honest with your employers, about deadlines, or a project being messed up and work snowballing. Hopefully they're understanding, but you might also avoid them being fined, and therefore wrecking your chances of getting jobs in the future