This Post Brought To You By the Persistence of Vision

It's been three weeks now. Productions are all well underway, and I've got some tests and roughs to share with you. AIB's Animation Production is predominantly 2D, though they do have a computer suite which runs Maya* and there is one stop-motion film being made this year. I only wish I could stay through the end of the year to see the films to completion.
* On LINUX...

I'm sort of working the field and contributing my talents to two different third-year films. The first one, Sol, plays the story of Phaëton next to a space flight loosely based on the Apollo 13 mission.* It promises to be a visually stunning film, with lots of great nebulæ and space-related background paintings. The design is very similar to my own drawing style, so that helps a lot. It's a really interesting piece, and it will look very impressive when everything's put together.

I've been working on constellations which will move and watch Phaëton streaming past in his father's chariot. The first bit of work I had was doing Aquarius. The aim was to create a feeling of the enormous scale that these constellations have. Everything is slow and elegant, like an ancient painting.
* Which sports three of the four horses** of Helios/Apollo's chariot on its insignia.
** Pyrios, Aeos, Aethon, and Phlegon. You knew this was coming.



After moving over to Risk for a few days (more on that later), I did more animated constellations. Gemini is in the same scene as Aquarius* watching the chariot. Similar thing. The whip is on a separate layer, and will be moved about and tweaked, but the animation is done.
* I know they're in the sky at opposite times of the year, but we're not on Earth here.



Concurrently, I'm animating on Risk, which is a more lighthearted and entertaining film. The story is about a chess king whose world is shattered when he accidentally gets dropped onto a Risk game board. It's a more cartoony film, with broad dynamic action and a lot of opportunity. It's completely different from Sol, which is why I decided to do both. Risk required me to only do rough passes, which is something I'm not used to at MICA: we have one chance to get the animation down for the two-week deadline for 15 seconds. We don't have enough time to do a rough pass, then a cleaned up version. So it's a good experience. I don't have to worry about drawing (as I did with the Sol pieces). The two pieces I have are from the first exposure the King has for the Risk battle. Very quick shots - only 14 frames - it was nice and refreshing after the 72 or 36 frames on the Sol bits.





I want to make a note about the way AIB handles line testing. While not perfect, it's still much faster and easier than MICA's process. AIB uses Monkey Jam, which is still in Beta, but it's a free download. We use a video camera on an animation stand to capture the frames directly through the program. It's way more immediate than the scanning-batching-reimporting method at MICA. I'm not afraid to just walk over and test what I'm doing every twenty frames or so. One of the biggest problems facing MICA animators can be remedied here... Monkey Jam! Use it!