the rest of the last semester

Hey guys,

So it's the holidays and I'm finally de-stressed enough to start the process of updating you on what I've been doing since the last time I posted.

Erm so I finished filming in a couple of days and I've finished the second character animation is also done. There's some tweaking to be done with the shadow character and I haven't quite figure out how to fix the issues I'm having quite yet. He's not looking anything like I planned. I wanted him to shift and warp and look like smoke however the puppet pin tool can't make a mask over a transparent image and that means I couldn't manipulate the shadow character the way I wanted to. This meant that I had to animate the shadow character in photoshop. It was a lot more complicated, then in the end the shadow still doesn't move like I wanted it to. So all in all that was a failure. No I either have to come up with a new way to warp the shadow or I need to abandon that idea completely. So there's that... Not so great progress made...

Next is the jewellery collab. Here's a link to the pinterest I created for my thoughts on it:

https://www.pinterest.com/Abimation/jewellery-meets-animation/

The brief for this project was to work with jewellery to create a piece of jewellery and a film that enhance your knowledge of one by the inclusion of the other. So after some thought our group decided on a brilliant concept that Vas previously had some experience with: Ferrofluid.

Ferrofluid is a black magnetic fluid that when a magnet is applied to it creates spikes and dips. You can also physically move the liquid with the magnet's force. Its really cool stuff. So originally our plan was to just create a piece of jewellery that incorporated it's movements and make an advert for it.   Like a cheeky one, a type of obscure perfume advert thing. But once we got thinking about the actual fluid we thought about how cool it would be to create two pieces of jewellery that could respond to each other and from here we got thinking about electromagnetic pulses and how we could connect them to the heart beat monitors that would read the beat of the wearers heart and have the ferro fluid respond to it.

So this was the idea. the completely unobtainable goal for this project. With this in mind we re-evaluated out cinematic goals with the outlook of helping people to understand what we were trying to do. So in the end we'd be left with a several prototypes of the jewellery and a film that explains what we wanted to do but didn't have the time to do.

So that brings us to where we are now.

I am mostly finished both films. and they should be finished not to long from now as the final dead line is only two weeks from now.