Innovations

Learning new programs is really challenging. Getting past the learning curve to a point where you can navigate the soft ware without having to look everything up takes time but it's really fun once you get the hang of it and can properly play. I tried to just have the line draw itself in this video but kinda mucked it up and it strangely morphs all over the play, which I think is a happy accident. It wasn't what I was trying to do but it makes for a really interesting effect.

Experimenting with a walk cycle from 'survivor's guide to animation'. So difficult to get the timing right! Three draft ideas/animatics for the animations. 

The face morph was the most intimidating thing for me because I couldn't figure out how to do it and that was holding me back from starting. So I just started with some messy things but it's given me a way better ida of what I want. Also was using TvPaint to animate these so there was a bit of a learning curve as well, and I'm finding there's not so many tutorials online for TvPaint, so it's a bit harder to figure things out than with the Adobe suite. So I'm imagining something in between these two

Photoshop: I like photoshop to animate because it's intuitive for me and I can do quite details drawings. It has many shortfalls though Animate: Animate does onion skinning and 'tagged' colours, where the colour changes across he whole animation if you change it in one frame OpenToonz: I really liked the idea of OpenToonz, but the user interface is dificult to navigate. I find it has a steeper learning curve than most and for the level on animation I'm working on right now, it has unnecessary steps to take just to animate, such as having a seperate drawing board from the animation board TV paint: It seems TV paint is a good combination of usability and technical proficiency. I find it harder to find decent tutorials on it but once I get the hang of it I think this is the best one for me. I like the adjustments you can make to the onion skinning and how easy it is to colour Basics Colouring Interface basics Aaron Blaise, getting into some more useful t...

Interesting looking at a combination of photographs and caricatures of both anti-Chinese and in defence of Chinese immigration. I've decided not to give my character a face, partly so I can just focus on the animation and partly inspired by a theory that a character without a face is one you can more easily imagine as yourself. This theory is used mostly in indie games, most recently in Ashen , a game by Aurora44. I really like the characters in Ashen for their simplicity and block-like style. But previously was a style in video games due to low polygon shapes. I think Ashen is bringing this back partly for nostalgia. I also find it nostalgic looking back at old video games I grew up with like the first tomb raiders or LBA 2.   Of course, I'm not doing a game, I'm doing an animation. I like this style, it reminds me of figure simplification like in life drawing

Planning to create a triptych showing three core things I imagine the Chinese community must be feeling; two are fear based, one external, one internal, and the last one is hope - Feeling the external xenophobia, fear, hate, boxing them in, racism, rumours - Guilt, fear for their country and loved ones, trying to get home, working hard without reward, tirelessly facing terrible conditions, ploughing forwards despite everything - Inner strength, descended from dragons, gold, fortune, luck, hope. "In the darkest of times, hope is something you give yourself. That is the true meaning of inner strength" - Uncle Iroh (avatar)