Dead Panda

My final animation for Ms. Corrigan continues the story of Panda. This time, we see him confront his own mortality. I chose to return to Flash for this one because I felt like I've already spent a good deal of time in After Effects, while there were things in Flash (like symbol-ception) that I hadn't explored yet. The funnest part of this animation was making Panda's facial expressions, but on the other hand it was tedious trying to keep his mouth movements in sync with the voice track.

Happy Panda

Here we see Panda in his natural habitat, going out for a walk. I chose to make this in After Effects because the parenting features really help with creating and maintaining the walk cycle, and nested compositions were useful for looping the walk on top of a scrolling background. However, like many before me, I was a victim of exploding rigs, and it was frustrating at first. Overall I did not enjoy making this as much as my previous animations.

Panda Sheet

This is Panda. Yes, that's his name. He's the star of my upcoming masterpiece ;)

Jump!

This was certainly my favorite project so far. It was nice to be back in After Effects, a program that never ceases to impress me with just how much it is capable of. Had a lot of fun with this one. No real melons were hurt in the process (I promise).

Wut

My first flash animation ever! I actually liked Flash a lot and found it fairly intuitive, however I struggled with hand-drawing the frames. A lot of erasing and re-drawing, even though my character was fairly simple (the only reason it looks remotely decent is because of Flash's smoothing feature, thank you Adobe).

Wut Sheet

Some poses from my upcoming animation:

No!

My second experience with stop motion was definitely a lot more frustrating than the one I described in my previous blog post. This time, we came up with the suicidal idea of using clay figures. But just in case that wouldn't be frustrating enough, Dragonframe was prepared to torture us with its own arsenal of technical difficulties (I had previously described it as a "sweet piece of software") alongside multiple camera batteries that decided to run out of juice at the worst times possible. However, it was all worth it when we saw the finished product, a grand story of determination and persistence that reflected our own struggles in the animation lab.

Pong Hard Mode

My first experience with stop motion animation was on this sweet piece of software called Dragonframe. In order to make a spectacular display of ball and bouncing physics, our group added a ball-splitting twist to the classic Pong game. It became challenging after a point to keep track of all the balls and flying bouncing action, but the worst part was when our camera flipped over. That aside, I discovered that stop motion animation can be a lot cooler and funner than I previously thought.

Welcome to Ahnafland

Hey there, you've stumbled upon the land of Ahnaf. I'm Ahnaf by the way.

If for some reason you don't know about me already, I'm a college student double-majoring in computer science and biomedical sciences. Outside of school I'm a game developer, currently working on building the next great mmorpg. I enjoy video games (especially the ones about a certain green-clad hero with elf ears and an awesome phrygian cap), anime, reading, racquetball, and fish sticks.

This will be where I publish my soon-to-come artistic masterpieces in computer animation. No really, I have some serious talent. Just check out this amazing OC:

Jerry

Despite that, I know that there is always much to learn, and to sharpen my animation skills I have decided to enroll in a computer animation course (with an awesome professor, she's super cool because she's gonna give me an A :) ). In taking this course I hope to learn new techniques in digital animation that I can particularly apply to my work as a game developer.

If you're looking forward to what I have in store, stick around in Ahnafland for a little longer and feel free to explore. But remember, it's dangerous to go alone.