Thanks =]

I have used sound samples from reason and using a midi keyboard played various notes along with the movements of the creature/spaceship. I have used piano sounds for the spider moving which gets eaten by the creature and appagio sounds for the flying spaceship, this all together makes the experience of the piece unusal/different which is the desired effect.

I am happy with the overall look as it was what I was aiming for but, unhappy how I ended the piece. As this was just a few scenes from the larger project. I was unhappy that I only got to the part for the viewer to interact with it and not have any interaction for them, but due to the amount of time it takes to draw, scan, open in photo shop, make adjustment and take out parts i didn’nt want meant i need to do a lot before i even opened it into after effects to create the animations. This film is silent as It was just a test to see how it looked first.

After seeing what it looked like animated I thought it didn’t look as smooth as I wanted and it almost looked like a different creature in each picture, the arm and legs moved at the wrong time with each other and overall wasn’t what I wanted my animation to look like. Researching how to animate movement I came across a website which did exactly that Idleworm. Here I saw alot clearer how the creature needed to move roughly. I decided to just draw the body to the simple diagrams in the tutorial. I left the head off as I wanted it to look constant and the same in each movement so I Photo-shopped the head into each image.

With all the images photo-shopped I imported them into after effects and placed them as it were on the wall to make the animation look as if was a creature walking.

Here are a few examples of spiders I found in Google Images.

From looking at these, I thought the legs needed to be longer than the spiders body, I wanted them to be sharp and pointy and scary looking. The abdomen needed to be the largest part of the spider’s body and i wanted to have some markings on it to give it some texture and pattern against the wall backdrop.

Now that I had my spider finished I needed to make it move just as a spider would. I went to Youtube and found some videos of spiders walking along. I payed close attention to how each leg moves individually when one is moving forward, on the opposite side it is staying still and the motion of the spider moving forward actually makes it look as if a leg is just moving backwards. I also noticed that it is the front and rear legs that do the largest movements, the inside ones just seem to shuffle along and I needed to get across with the movements of the animation.

Here is the final animation of the spider walking, I made points at the top of the leg near the body in after effects, which meant I could rotate the legs to make the movement. I made the spider come down to look as if it were about do something and had it quickly retreat as if it were scared of the creature that is coming towards. I did this because I don’t really like spiders, they remind me of the film arachnophobia where a spider comes and kills people. The twist now is that the spider gets eaten and killed.

I started off by drawing one in illustrator, I decided to draw several angles as i wasn’t sure if i was going to make the space ship look as if it were coming towards the viewer or not.

I then wanted to see what it would look like if i was to add colour to the space craft. I went over the space ship in water colour paint. I think it made it stand out a lot more than just black and white, however i think the brightness would detour from it being a bit dark and grubby.

The clean edges of the space ships just didn’t give that hand drawn feel that I wanted so I decided to use this space craft as an outline and trace over it .

I drew lots of various markings to the right of the ships so i could add them to the space ship if i wanted to in Photo shop.

I then used the tops space ship and cut and pasted the top of it on to the bottom to make it look more symmetrical as my drawing was a bit wonky. Using a few marking i decided to place them on the ship and thought that if i move them on the ship enough frames it would look like it was rotating around.

I started by just drawing where simple lines to make the bone structure.

I then went around the outline thinking of making it look slim and like a ‘grey’ alien. Even just drawing this shape gave me the creeps I remembered all the image from signs that freaked me out as a child.

Here is my final out come for the creature.

I want to incorporate some child hood nostalgia into my project so I have looked at a few cartoons and films that i watched when I was a child. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Attack of the killer pizzas was one I remember as there are some cute small creatures that turn into this huge monsters. I think this clip will also be good for looking at as the creatures are seen front on, from the side and crawl up and down walls, much like I have planned in my storyboard.

Gremlins is another film I wanted to look at as they too are cute creatures that have an underlying alter ego and transform into monsters that cause trouble and mayhem

From taking the image I then imported it into after effects where I wanted to test how I was going to move around the room for each scene, I kept all the default setting and just set different positions every few seconds/frames. Here is this test.

I think the clip just looks like what it is, an image which has been enlarged and moved about, I don’t like the smoothness of it and I prefer the Stop Animation feel that Muto has it makes you think that the reason there is a jolt is because they have had to make the piece them move the camera to take the image. which is what I will need to do to make this look more real.