Revisiting Disney

Its May 21st, and I am spending the day working on my final animation project, which will bring me one step closer to graduation.  This class was meant to cover Adobe After Effects, specifically.

By the time I fumbled my way through the rudimentaries of navigating the computer lab, Corvid-19 set in, causing Brooklyn College to move to the "distance learning model".  The syllabus for the class changed to accommodate those who are not setup with computers at home.  This was an unexpected boon, which caused me to have a practical understanding of timing in animation that would have taken years to learn on AFX.   We made flip books for an assignment, "the classic bouncing ball." After 47 drawings, I had one and a half seconds worth of bouncing.  My "Jumping Girl" took 138 drawings for 4 seconds.  The computer does something called interpolation between frames, which is the act of filling in the inevitable missing information.  This is a wildly complex process with limitations.  Hence, the many drawings.  The math gets as complicated as you want to make it regarding frame rates, etc.
      During our last class discussion regarding timing, I was experiencing some pleasantly innervating mental triangulation regarding the word "parallax". When the figure in an animation composition or anything is moving, the layers of space behind it move at different speeds, the closest layer moving the slowest.  This is referred to a "parallax", and is also the name for what happens to a shape when viewed from two different positions.  Astronomers use the concept used by to measure space outside of our solar system.

 

We were introduced to Oskar Fischinger's work, "Optical Poem" with its gyrating shapes, Grave of the Fireflies, by Isao Takahata, and we revisited Disney often. There is lots to explore there, when admittedly I had written it off because of the Prince and Princess thing. I watched Wall-E for the first time, and even the bit between the two robots was a bit cloying, although I loved the movie's first half with all the piles of metal, and Wall-E, himself. I didn't need to see all the fat lazy people. The Iron Giant - how come I have never seen this movie?

I am thinking about the kids in my class. I am a graduate student, but the class was undergraduate class, so I very realistically could have been their mother, and was probably older than the teacher. Sadly, I am not good with computers, so it filled me with fear when I saw the other screens in the class fill with After Effects magic, while I was trying to find my file. They are responsible, bright, and so so young! When I think seriously about how my life would have been affected if this plague came when I was in my 20's or 30's, I feel the depth of sadness that I have been able to avoid, due to the distraction of school.

This is my "Goldilocks" who is a silver-haired "Moldilocks". Goldilocks originally had silver hair, but because of reasons, it was changed to gold somewhere along the way. I clearly have things to work out with this 10 seconds of a "walk-cycle". I will replace the video after I work out the bug regarding the table. I decided at the 11th hour that the original table was too small to be for bears, so I had to make a new table and add it in, which I did not leave time to do properly, because I am a spaz.

Love,
Kryzamelah