Sunday, November 21, 2010

2D Animation Ridiculousness

As always, this week I chose to spend a really really long time doing my 2D animation homework, at the expense of all my other classes (just kidding, any teachers that might be reading this).


Flour Sack Dos from Michael Piazza on Vimeo.

Traditional Animation + Photoshop + Flash + After Effects = My ever increasing need to sleep.


Long Technical Rant: Going into this assignment, I wanted to focus less on the animation (sorry Scott - most of it's on 3s and 4s) so I could spend my time figuring out the insanity that is After Effects. I animated everything traditionally (note to self, ColorErase doesn't scan in nicely), scanned it all in, batch processed it in Photoshop to get it on cels, and then timed it all out in After Effects. From there, I switched all my layers to 3D mode (:O), and separated out my ground planes to different depths. After that, I could move my 3D camera around, and the animation would show convincing parallax (things in front move more than things in back). The only downside is that shit takes FOREVER to render with a 3D camera. Creds for this go to the magical Tahnee Gehm.
I fear this program. 
But less now.


At this point, I realized I had forgotten to animate the trailing ears and feet on the sack - so this also became a test of integrating flash and traditional animation.  I don't think it looks particularly great, but at least I know how to do it now - and it's something that might appear in my film.


Overall, even though this all took a stupid amount of time (mostly because I'm so new to it), I feel just that much more prepared to do some crazy stuff when film season comes around second semester. Space Babe, watch out. 

Friday, November 19, 2010

In Lieu of Posting ACTUAL Work-

Here's a drawing I did of badass extraordinaire Jorge Gutierrez at his recent CalArts lecture. He totally dug it and signed it below. This made me happy.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

DEATH TO ALL FLOURSACKS! [animation]


Floursacks of Danger from Michael Piazza on Vimeo.

Latest assignment for Scott Wright's Animation class. I really went all out on this one, but I'm happy with how it turned out!

Monday, November 8, 2010

DANCING Birds!



Today, we learned how to use the Puppet Tool in AfterEffects.



This is going to change my life.


(For those who don't know/are curious: the Puppet Tool lets you take an existing image you've made, add "joints", and animate them moving. My birds, for example, have joints in the hips, knees, necks, and body. Once you've drawn a cool picture, it's incredibly easy to rig it up with these joints and make a simple animation. This animation probably only took me about 20 minutes, as opposed to many hours if I hand drew it each frame, which is the standard practice.. )

Monday, November 1, 2010

CG balls, so bouncy.

For CG Animation

Yeah, so it's not the most interesting thing ever - but I have a huge backlog of art to post! Soon soon soon.


In the meantime, here's my desktop background at school:
That way, I always stay productive! It's also my background in Maya: