Week 10

Last week we shared our character sheets with the class. I decided that the most effective use of my time would be spent creating the walk cycle for my alien character. I have nine or ten poses in my alien's walk cycle. I also did multiple forward facing views of my alien character. I wanted to create various poses that I could use to make my alien dance and walk toward the "camera" rather than just across the stage. I also drew little pictures of objects that I would like to include in my animation, including a radio, wreath, snowman, and a lamp post.

This weekend I brought my alien walk cycle images into Illustrator and used the live trace tool to turn them into vector images. I had to do some editing in Photoshop as well to make sure that all of the lines connected so that after I live traced the pictures it would be easier to fill them in with the appropriate colors. I found that bringing the vector images into Flash was helpful because in Flash I can break apart the images and proceed to fill them in with the paintbucket tool. I converted all of my walk cycle images into graphic symbols. This week in class I would like to line everything up in a frame by frame manner to get a perfectly animated walkcycle. In addition, I created a dancing alien and a boombox that releases music notes this weekened. I used movie clips to achieve this.