Yesterday, I worked on the script for the story, I am just going by all the ideas we have, and some of them are not complete, so I had to make some connections to make the story make sense more. I finished most of the backstory for the main character, but not all of it, we plan on slowly revealing details of what happened during his childhood, kind of similar to the show Arrow. Using this method, we will be able to quickly switch between present and past at suspenseful moments to have our audience more interested. Jun came on for a bit and helped connect the dots a bit.
I also went and researched a lot of 2D animation programs, such as Synfig, Pencil, KToon, Stykz, and much, much more. A lot of problems with these are that they either, cost money, are extremely outdated (not being worked on anymore), too limiting, crash a lot, or just lack a lot of basic functions a 2D animation program should have.
For example, Synfig, has the tool bars on one window, and the actual screen with the animation on another, so you have to constantly switch, which becomes really annoying. Synfig is also the program I used for the animation in my second genius hour project about Nuclear Power, it crashed about 8-10 times to make that 1 minute animation.
Another problem I have is to deal with vector art, while I have only been doing bitmap art, more commonly known as pixel art. Bitmap art, uses pixels, which are made of red, green, and blue. The advantage of Bitmap art, or raster images, are that all digital pictures and images scanned from the printer is automatically in the raster form. Another advantage is that you can create realistic images with bitmap art. Vector art, however cannot do this. Vector art uses points and lines to create images, then fills in colour between the lines. The advantage with vector art is that, unlike bitmap art, it is scaleable, which means you can make it as big as you want without it becoming extremely ugly. Another advantage of vector art is that the file size is smaller than bitmap art, because the file contains information about the object, rather than every single pixel.
You can find more information about Vector art V.S. Bitmap art here.
Today, I downloaded Autodesk Maya (student version) to the recommendation of Jimmy M, in grade 10. Jimmy has done animation before, so he recommends Maya, because it's fast, easy to use, and more user friendly, while blender is more for professional animators who do this for a living.
Just now, I found out that you can animate using Google Sketchup. Google Sketchup is a 3D modeling program made by Google to create 3D buildings for Google Earth. It is now released to the public for free (YAY GOOGLE) and is one of the best programs I know. They also teach you how to use Google Sketchup in Tech Ed. so it will also be a lot easier to use for everyone else, it is also very user friendly. Google Sketchup (from what I just saw from my testing a couple minutes ago), is probably what we are going to use to replace Blender.
During lunch, we have also been talking about continuing this as a mini-series after the project is done and/or make it into a book.
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