Just a quick go on my new graphics tablet, getting used to it and its many buttons in photoshop. I don't really know why I drew an eyeball; spur of the moment thing. Anyway, hopefully be doing some more interesting pictures fairly soon once the new year festivities are over.

After looking at my Christmas photos of this year I had a sudden realisation about why I love photography so much. Some photographers love to use long exposures, fancy filters etc to get a nice shot, which can be brilliant sometimes, but I always feel I get more satisfaction that relies on two rules: composition and timing. Composition is pretty self explanatory, and your eyes can tell if a shot is well composed even if you don't know anything about it. By timing I mean a shot which was snapped just at the right moment to capture an expression, a fleeting moment that might very rarely happen again. You've captured a little something only you saw and can then share it with the world.


Also I seem to have a mild vendetta against using any sort of flash at the moment.

So here it is, the final audio clip animation project for my assessment on Tuesday.

Notes and evaluation coming in the next post.

I completed some of the changes I wanted to make on scene 1 of the animation, but not that happy overall with it. The shrug and head bob/sniff should have been timed better, and I'm not even sure if the sniff works without a "sniff" sound. Anyway I'm keeping it in now due to time restraints. The actual lip syncing isn't that bad, so its not all horrible.


Would have been nice to have a bit more time to mess around with this and get it right, but that's something I can do once the assessment is over, as the main concern now is to make the piece work as a whole and not worry too much about the details when there are other pressing concerns with it.

Working out how to zoom in slowly and smoothly was solved with a couple of cut-up sticky dots on the lens of my camera to keep track of exactly how much the lens was to zoom during the forty or so frames, thus enabling me to divide them up appropriately and move the zoom of the lens incrementally.

This was more of an exercise of trying out how zooming would work when filming frames, and I feel I have learned from trying it. You don't know how these things work until you try them out.

Anyway, this was done for the opening second or two I wanted to add onto the beginning of the 'Uncoupling' project just to set the scene for the piece, rather than having it dive straight in and the audience not grasp what's going on.

It turned O.K, acceptable for its purpose, but if I had more time it would have been nice to put a few more frames in and smooth it out a little, with some more background animation.

The bulk of the animation is done on the monkey now, however this test has highlighted what I need to do next:

• doubles for the jump off table to smooth it out
• "un" on "uncoupling" need a better mouth shape - its not conveying it properly
• get the backgrounds and background props in
• test entire clip for continuity
• add start intro bit (2 scenes of panning in)

Those are the main things I must do, but there are a few other bits and bobs id like to change/add also if I get time, such as monkey walking off etc.

Feedback please!