The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy rabid badger.

Blogger decided to have a freak out on me and wouldn't let me type anything. I appreciate that in a blogging website, really.

Today I did some animation and worked on finalizing the look of a few shots. I will present them to you now! (Go team!)

This first image is a shading test I did. This was colored in Mirage using the closest colors I can decide on for my final look. They keep changing, so just assume that in another month her skin will be green, her hair will be red, and she'll be wearing purple slacks and a tshirt. For now, though, I'm liking the slightly more blue-green dress (as apposed to the more washed out blue-gray color), and her hair is a dark yellow with light orange shading. Her skin color seems pretty bland right now, but maybe I'll figure that out eventually. My ultimate goal is to be able to get enough animation done this semester that I can use shading in my film. I haven't tried it in any other animation I've done yet, and I think it could really be successful.

This next image is the scene I did for class on Tuesday. I only colored this one frame, but the look is really pretty awesome. I spent the afternoon looking through Deviantart for inspiration on my trees, and I'm pretty darn happy with this outcome, honestly. I'm not sure how this blue-green color is going to carry over from previous scenes (there's a shot of just the trees/bushes a few shots earlier than this), but I really think it has a better atmosphere than using green. It's hard to tell, but Mel is a very dark brown, not black. (Hopefully that will read on other computers, as my screen is probably very bright.) I colored this in Photoshop, then duplicated each layer and blurred the copied layers behind the original layers. As there's very little actual animation in this scene, I wanted to make it look impressive. I'm planning on using After Effects to move the different layers to give it a very ominous feeling :).

Also, in my Devianart explorations today I came across a fun tutorial on Photoshopping trees. I didn't end up using it in this picture, but with this many trees to draw, I assure you it will come in handy in the future.

Haha! Now my goal is to try and customize this blog to some extent. I already changed the background, but my goal is to change the rest of it by the end of the year :). I can't have my seldom-used HTML and CSS skills go to waste.