animation progress

Here’s my progress on the animation. It doesn’t look like much but wow is rotoscoping time consuming! I wildly underestimated the amount of time needed for this task. I am in the home stretch though with it and I can finally jump into the other parts of the animation this week. *I ran into a frustrating error with after effects tonight that I have not been able to figure out. For some reason the rotoscoping I did on of the green pepper layer tripped up the animation so for now I had to turn it off completely. (That’s why it is not cut out in the latter part of the sequence.) I don’t know if the mocha file got corrupted some how but more to google this week.

Here’s the first cut of episode 1! 

Still left to do (a lot!)

-finalize opening animation 

-shoot and edit 30-second how-to video

-add to website 

-finalize episode cut 

more project progress

Things have definitely progressed since last week on many fronts. Perhaps the biggest one is my strategy for rotoscoping the hand cutouts in the opening animation. I reached out to our former animation teacher and she suggested I try Mocha, which is an After Effects plugin that has better tools for rotoscoping. The tool has been a tremendous help! It is way faster and more accurate. This is a test I did from the new footage I shot this week. (Please ignore the white lines in the hand, which will be fixed for the final version.) 

I also have the final recording of my mom playing the piano! I think it sounds gorgeous and it’s so meaningful that my mom did this. We ended up speeding up the recording digitally for the animation sake and were able to get some help from Ali’s friend who is an audio master to help smoothen out the track. 

Lastly, I focused on chopping up the edits for Bobby’s episode. I am hoping to have a decent rough cut, by tomorrow (Monday) night. I can already tell that it will be hard to pair it down! 

type logo

This week, I also played with refining the type logo. Some of the feedback on the original logo had been that the composition was awkward and also the “spice” typeface did not connote a warm or friendly tone. First I made a new list of typefaces that I felt had qualities like expressive, warm, friendly and creative. Here’s the list I started with:

I settled on #6, which is the “Kalam” typeface. I then played with the overall composition to create 4 variations. Which one speaks to you?

Animation Progress

This week I wanted to dive in with the animation opening. I’m glad I started early because I have a lot more to go! Main concepts I was thinking about was starting clean and ending messy. I also tried to analyze the music to plan out animation. 

Start Clean and end Messy is the design goal

A lot of times, I think of animation in little segments that build off of each other so I have the first segment mapped out roughly, emphasis on rough:

Please ignore the sloppy hand cutouts! I realized I need to reshoot these videos so I did not cut them out perfectly knowing that these are not the final videos. I plan to reshoot the videos this week and focus on these elements:

• I am going to use a tomato instead of a red pepper and some other brighter green veggie instead of kale

• I am going to shoot a still image of each ingredient before I shoot the hands coming onto the screen to play with this for animation

• I am going to use either a green or white cutting board. I think this will help with the cutouts. 

• Now that I know the positions of the ingredients on the screen, I need to make sure Ali’s hand enters from the bottom of the screen so his arm does not get cut off. 

This coming week in addition to reshooting the hands footage, I will work on cutting out those footage and play with the other sections of the animation. I am will also rerecord my mom’s piano playing on a better recorder for the final. 

Updated project plan!