Final Semester Blog Post 5 - Animation Increases and Finally Animating the Cat

I'm excited to announce that animation of our cat, Bartholomew, has finally begun among those of us who are animating!! Lila, Cal, Isabel, and I have started messing with his rig, and Rianne has been working on the skinning issues!! he's turning out super well, and is also beginning to be textured by Ash!! It's super exciting to see him moving around, and not just standing there, stuck in his stiff pose like he has been for most of our film so far. He's really starting to develop a personality!! It's fun to see him swatting at the yarn balls or playing with the strings. His rig is still a little jenky but that is something that Rianne has been fixing, now that the rigs of all the other characters have been pretty much finished and are set in stone. I'm also glad we can finally animate all versions of Brocade, so that his story will make much more sense now. It was a little confusing for viewers previously because only one of his models had a rig, when we have four different models of him.

I've really been enjoying animating my scenes. I feel like I need to speed up and spend more time on my animations, but I'm so busy that's been a bit of a struggle. I will say though that I am going to work a lot over Spring Break, hopefully at least a little bit every day, so that I can have my animation scenes done by the end of March!! All of them, including the ones I took from Isabel and Sam so they could focus on their own work. I'm excited to work on them, honestly. Sam's scenes look fun, and the one I took from Isabel is a VERY important shot, and I am honored she trusted me enough to give it to me when she figured out she wouldn't be able to do it.

It's been a lot of fun and such a wonderful journey animating these guys, especially now since all versions of the yarn balls now have working face rigs. Their eyes are so squishy!! It's adorable, and it allows me to mess with them in so many interesting ways!! I can make them blink, happy, sad, melty, crescent shaped, soft, sharp, and more!! So much potential for personality and emotion with such a simple set of controls. I'm obsessed. Also have been having a lot of fun with strings hanging from or attached to other things. Follow-through is such a fun motion, you know?? Getting the base motions down is fun, don't get me wrong, but all the miniscule little movements with the strings or objects attached to the characters?? I enjoy that so so much, you have no idea.

Posters are almost due and Rianne has done a wonderful job working on our poster, and I'm excited to see it up in the hallway in a big movie poster style!! Like the ones from previous years. I'm so so proud of her for how much she's done. Not only did she write this story and has been the one controlling and assisting with the vision, but she's done all the rigging, made our poster, and even did some animating!! It's impressive, honestly, and I couldn't ask for a better teammate. And I would apply that statement to my entire team, honestly. I love them all very much, and I'm glad we haven't had many intrapersonal struggles like some of the other teams. We disagree on things at times, sure, but we've never gotten mad at each other, which I take as a win!!

New scenes keep getting animated, lit, and rendered, which results in a bunch of new shots getting added to our film each week!! I pulled up the most recent edit two days ago to show some freshmen who wanted to see the work in progress, and nearly choked when I saw some rendered scenes that had definitely NOT been there the last time I looked at it. If I were to go out via a heart attack, I think I'd like it to be because of that, haha. It was super surprising in the very best way. Every day our film gets better and better, and I am becoming more and more obsessed with it!! Can't wait to see the final edit at the end of April.

I'm starting to work on my little yarnsona for our credit sequence. The consensus from my group said that I need to have pipe cleaner glasses, a bunch of little charms like all the keychains on my backpack, and a fake flower upside down as a bucket hat. I think that's adorable, and I love hearing what everyone thinks of as "Mack's defining traits", if you get what I mean!! It's super cute and I'm looking forward to sketching it soon. Still trying to decide on the color though.

Either way, I'm excited, confident, and kind of jittery and nervous about the upcoming deadline. I cannot believe we're almost done!!!!