Progress Log - Johnny

    This may or may not be my last progress log, for we are presenting in approximately 10 hours. We have not been able to complete all of the script, but we were able to complete a few. So I took those and used Adobe after effects to put them together and make it into a movie trailer style. I took some sound effects from soundbible.com and the music from the korean drama Slave Hunter.

    I did the Guardian scene and the Researching scene, I will include my speech which talks about this in further detail in the Finished Product section.

    It is currently 1:45, I have now finished rendering the video into an .AVI file. I will now convert it to .SWF and upload it to a dump website in case the file won't open. The video is 2 minutes long, but thats OK because the majority of it we're going to be talking about our project.

Johnny, signing off.

Man I'm so weird when I'm tired.

Finished

I have finished my ninja fighting scene animation. I have sent my flash animation to Johnny so he can put everything together in a video.

Jun's Progress Log.

 I have started my animation since last Thursday. After Our group's scripts for the movie were finished, each of us got to animate a scene for the movie. I picked out a fighting scene with ninjas fighting with the main character. On Thursday I finished the intro for the fight. On Friday, I made an animation of Ninja running to join the fight. On Saturday, I put a short scene of the main character fighting ninjas. On Sunday, I continued that fighting scene. On Monday, I did an animation of the good ninja joining in the fight. today is Tuesday, I am planning to add bad ninjas to the fight scene getting beaten up by the good ninja and main character.



http://youtu.be/mzQzF6wUU_I

Something like the link above. (Fight Scene)

Jadyn's Progress

I started adobe flash last week then I picked out my scene. It was one of the shorter scenes because I didn’t have as much experience with flash as the others did but I pretty much got the hang of it. Frist I learned how  the layout worked and figured out what the tools did the I learnt how to use the bone tool and I fooled around with it for a while.  Afterwards I learned a little bit of how to do frame by frame. Making my scene seemed pretty easy in the beginning but then afterward I ran into some unexpected problems. I found out that I couldn’t copy move the object I used bone tool on and that I should have made my objects on separate layers. After fixing all that up I finished my animation.

June 3rd - Progress Log - Johnny

    After a bit more research, I found that Adobe Flash is probably the best program for animating, and the bad things said about it are just for using it in website, so we plan on making parts of the animations in flash and exporting it into a QuickTime file (.MOV) and then converting it to a .AVI file if needed. I also discovered that although you can animate with Google Sketchup, it does not remember the location of each object when you animate things, that means you can only move the camera. This means that we will not be able to use Google Sketchup as much but we can use it for a 360 shot of a frozen scene (eg. start of a fight scene).    

   Given by the current time frame, we will probably be using 2D animation for the whole thing, and if we still have time after that, we might do a bit of 3D. For the presentation, I think that half of it will be the animation, an half of it will be the peer review, the process, ect... To record my process, I am using CamStudio to record my screen, I will use it to record myself making the animation then speed it up 5-10 times and put it in the process.

    One problem I am running into with Adobe Flash, is that I cannot use it, because I have already used my trial time up, and Adobe is smart now so they prevent you from uninstalling and re-installing. I am going to try and look for an old version or download on a different computer and just move it on to this one. If all of these doesn't work, we will have to work on it at school, since they have Adobe Flash.

    I have also worked on the script a bit, I smoothed out a bit of the parts Jarrod did and added a bit in between. I feel like we are almost done the script so we should be able to focus on animating soon.

May 31st - Progress Log - Johnny

  Yesterday, I worked on the script for the story, I am just going by all the ideas we have, and some of them are not complete, so I had to make some connections to make the story make sense more. I finished most of the backstory for the main character, but not all of it, we plan on slowly revealing details of what happened during his childhood, kind of similar to the show Arrow. Using this method, we will be able to quickly switch between present and past at suspenseful moments to have our audience more interested. Jun came on for a bit and helped connect the dots a bit.

  I also went and researched a lot of 2D animation programs, such as Synfig, Pencil, KToon, Stykz, and much, much more. A lot of problems with these are that they either, cost money, are extremely outdated (not being worked on anymore), too limiting, crash a lot, or just lack a lot of basic functions a 2D animation program should have.

  For example, Synfig, has the tool bars on one window, and the actual screen with the animation on another, so you have to constantly switch, which becomes really annoying. Synfig is also the program I used for the animation in my second genius hour project about Nuclear Power, it crashed about 8-10 times to make that 1 minute animation.

  Another problem I have is to deal with vector art, while I have only been doing bitmap art, more commonly known as pixel art. Bitmap art, uses pixels, which are made of red, green, and blue. The advantage of Bitmap art, or raster images, are that all digital pictures and images scanned from the printer is automatically in the raster form. Another advantage is that you can create realistic images with bitmap art. Vector art, however cannot do this. Vector art uses points and lines to create images, then fills in colour between the lines. The advantage with vector art is that, unlike bitmap art, it is scaleable, which means you can make it as big as you want without it becoming extremely ugly. Another advantage of vector art is that the file size is smaller than bitmap art, because the file contains information about the object, rather than every single pixel.
You can find more information about Vector art V.S. Bitmap art here.




    Today, I downloaded Autodesk Maya (student version) to the recommendation of Jimmy M, in grade 10. Jimmy has done animation before, so he recommends Maya, because it's fast, easy to use, and more user friendly, while blender is more for professional animators who do this for a living.

    Just now, I found out that you can animate using Google Sketchup. Google Sketchup is a 3D modeling program made by Google to create 3D buildings for Google Earth. It is now released to the public for free (YAY GOOGLE) and is one of the best programs I know. They also teach you how to use Google Sketchup in Tech Ed. so it will also be a lot easier to use for everyone else, it is also very user friendly. Google Sketchup (from what I just saw from my testing a couple minutes ago), is probably what we are going to use to replace Blender.

    During lunch, we have also been talking about continuing this as a mini-series after the project is done and/or make it into a book.

May 29th- Process Log

Today we had a double block in humanities class, Ms. Lees let us use this time to work on the Genius Hour projects. We used these two blocks to work on the story ideas for our animations and conferenced with Ms. Lees, we also discussed some of the issues that we might face and how we should resolve them. One of the issues we talked about was time, so we decided that we should work on this everyday, and try and follow the time-frame that Johnny made. We also talked about the general presentation and the product, Johnny showed us this article that talks about how to tell good stories, for example, it talks about using suspense, irony, metaphors, ect.... What is particularly good about this site is that the person who wrote it does real research through other articles, books, and personal experiences, he includes examples and links so we can know that it is a reliable source and not just someone writing gibberish to get views. Johnny also showed us an animation of a fight which can be an example for us when/if we do a fighting scene.

The person who made this animation also made a tutorial of how he makes these.

Keep in mind that this is not the only way to animate a fight, this is just the way he has learned how to do it,  and we are probably going to do this unless we find a better way. 

We then worked on the story ideas and general back story for some characters on a Google document, keep in mind that these are just ideas and are not organized in any way, these will not make much sense.

Here's what we have so far:

He was only 3 years old when that incident happened on that day. He and his family were on an island of horror. After their plane crash, most of his family members were injured. Before he passed out he remembers seeing his mother’s and dad’s limp, lifeless body. Then he sees his older brother (5 years old), reaching his hand out towards him. His brother was bruised badly and was on the ground. He could hear roaring from all around him and the last thing he saw before he was carried off was scarred dinosaur’s face.
Years years later the boy turned 26. He finally remembered the time on that island because he finds a dinosaur book that had the picture of the dinosaur king that took his brother away from him. He goes searching for the island, he reaches the island, fights ninjas, and a troll, then finds a mysterious knight to help him find his brother. They both roam around the island and gets into many troubles. He gets attacked by giant tarantula, group of raptors and a tribe of Native warriors.


Then he finds out it was the dinosaur kingdom who raided their village and killed his parents.


He defeats the dinosaur army with his knight brother and 7 other ancient warriors that were survivors from his village. They all attack the Dinosaur’s kingdom and have a massive war. 3 of his members die but they end up defeating the dinosaur king. In the end, the black knight gets wounded really bad by a dinosaur and he turns out to be the guy’s brother. The revenge has succeeded and he goes back to home.

WHEN THE DINOSAUR DIES IT HAS A BUNCH OF WIRES BECAUSE IT WAS A ROBOT DINOSAUR!!!!!!!!


OTHER ENDING, HIS BROTHER (WHO IS DISGUISED AS THE KNIGHT THE WHOLE TIME) CONTROLS THE DINOSAUR KING AHHHHHHHHH

OTHER OTHER OTHER ENDING, THE KNIGHT WAS BROTHERS SON!!!!! THE KNIGHT HATED HIM BECAUSE THE MAIN CHARACTER LEFT THEM.

Indiana jones MUSIC, then lawyer comes in “THAT'S COPYRIGHTED”

At the end of the story, we make a parody of one of the battle scenes. When the black knight dies, he charges a dinosaur king and gets stepped on. But then we rewind that and make the black knight drink milk and then he goes to the dinosaur king and throws him off and around then he comes back to the main character and says got milk.

An adventurer gets lost in the jungle. The different paths are his choices. Ex. You find a road in the jungle, do you take it? Also he can be attacked by a tiger. He is looking for a hidden treasure. It is rumored that everyone who tried to get it had never come back. The adventurer. In his twenties. He lost someone important to him(plane crash, he goes to find them)He gets attacked by a tiger. The tiger says:YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!This is after his head turns into Gandalf's head.



In the end, when he gets the artifact, it opens a time portal which sends a knight and a dinosaur though.
Or in the end he is sent back to the time he lost the important person to prevent losing that persons.

    Tomorrow we are going to finish the actual script, which is going to be a scene by scene and going to describe every action so when we start to animate, we can just look at the script instead of trying to do it from the top of our heads.