The finished piece!

I've finally done it after DAYS of trying different compression techniques. It has been SO tedious to enable to file size to retain quality but shrink it enough to place onto youtube but I did it and I'm fairly happy with the result. One thing to note is the change of ending for the story. Initially I had it written that after he stops taking anti-depressants he will fall into a worse state of depression but instead I opted for a happier ending in which he could appreciate being unhappy more than he could bear to feel nothing at all on his medication. I think the happier ending is a lot easier to swallow and makes it a little more uplifting.

A further update...

The four images below are of the sound editing stage of my animation. I was able to use the library that I have from the music recording software Mixcraft as well as the vast online library from freesfx.co.uk which offers royalty free music and sound effects. I sometimes had to edit sounds that I'd downloaded in Mixcraft to make them a little shorter in order to fit my animation. This is possible in Flash but it's nowhere near as simple. I also had to figure out how to apply a layer mask over the entire animation in order to block out the additional items that bleed over the Flash stage which took quite some time.

The following four images are photos of the final few segments of storyboard along with a rough initial character design for the Doctor. Some of the scenes I was able to cut while (hopefully) retaining the basic plot.

A Biiiig Update

I've been putting off showing any of my animation because I want it to be seen finished... HOWEVER for the sake of next weeks crit I'm going to have to upload the whole unfinished thing sooner or later. With that in mind I thought I'd show my latest sketchbook pages, a screenshot of my workspace in Flash and a gif of one of the scenes I'm using.

When it's time to show the animation it will no doubt be noticed that I've strategically never shown my little blue mans feet to avoid annoying walk cycles!

Sound effects...

I've made around 15 seconds of hand drawn animation (also using a couple of 'tweens' on slow moving objects such as clouds) and so I thought I'd stop for a second to think about applying sound effects.

As far as I can tell, if I wish a sound to overlap into multiple scenes then the scenes in question will have to sit on the same time line rather than on individual scene tabs. That is certainly something to consider when applying ambient sound effects to scenes.

I'm very fortunate to have access to a large sound library that comes as part of a package with some music recording software that I've used for many years so for the most part I shouldn't have to record my own sounds but if I do then Mixcraft will make that easy.

I found a video on youtube that shows how to add audio files to flash files so this will be helpful to keep on the blog to refer back to as and when necessary.

It's pretty basic but that's what I need at this level.

I think once it comes to more complicated sounds that have to be synced with movements then I'll need some additional help but for now this tutorial will help me with my title scene and again once I have to apply an entire audio track.

Title scene

I'll try not to post every single scene that I do on here as a GIF but I'm pretty pleased that I'm getting a fairly decent grasp of flash now.
This will be my opening titles. I'll be adding sounds of birds and stuff to it when it's finalised and perhaps a fade in but then I want the scene to just jump straight into the house to see our character lying in bed.
I really hope this all works out!

A couple more rough tests

So this is your standard, extremely fast walk cycle, it would have a lot more frames in it normally but because  I wanted it to look smooth I made it super fast.

Underneath is just a little splodge test of sorts that I did because I probably won't use the walk cycle for my monster. I wanted to show a weird way of moving around so this was just a little test. Stupid, but fun!

Eureka!

Ok so the other day I was sketching out some really crappy character ideas based on the fact that most of my animation is gonna be hand drawn into flash so it had to be simple. As you can see below, none of them were really going anywhere.

So I did this for awhile and after my learning agreement consultation I decided that the animation had to have more appeal. I told David that most animations have appeal by incorporating comedy into the mix. So I thought about that for a little while and started roughing out my first scene (after the title scene) which you can see below in the form of a never ending GIF of doom.

This took me a LONG time, but I am essentially learning as I'm going so I didn't mind. Also I'm ahead of schedule so any animation I do this week and next is extra bonus points (that I've assigned myself because I can do that).

So I had roughly 14 seconds of pretty boring animation but I was still racking my brain for this extra comedic appeal factor. And that's where it hit me. Why does it need to be a depressed MAN? Why can't it be an animal? Hell, why can't it be a monster or an alien?! This instantly invigorated me and I had to text my girlfriend Kayleigh straight away to ask if this was a good decision. She asked me some questions and I quickly justified them all in a similar way to this: Working with monsters will free me up from complicated human animation that will need to look a certain way, it will allow me to create an abstract sort of world which will make it more interesting to watch, it will generally appear more comical AND FINALLY it will actually help add subtlety to the theme of the animation. A man being depressed is all well and good but a monster being depressed can carry the exact same message but in a much more visually appealing way.

Well, that's what I think. So now I'm working on simplistic monster ideas. I want them to be sort of malleable because I want them to have strange fluid, morphing-like characteristics. I have an especially disturbing idea in mind for the visiting the DR scene that just wouldn't work if you weren't a squishy sort of monster thing. Anyway, below are my first sketches.