My Exploration with Xtra Normal - week 3/4

The second program I explored this week was called Xtra Normal - a free site for making 3-D movies. My colleague introduced this to me and I thought it would be a perfect tool to explore for this course.

I still have a lot to learn and need to play around with it, but in a few hours, I was able to produce something I kinda liked...but then I lost it! : (

The first couple of tries were quite funny....I didn't put any gestures/expressions in, so it just looked like two monotone characters talking...very unnatural!

Also...remember to sign-in and then make a movie...I FINALLY got it kinda the way I wanted it, only to find out I wasn't signed in (honestly, it wasn't my fault, I don't know what happened!)...yeah,needless to say, I wasn't too pleased!

Also, if you have to leave it for any given amount of time...click the button
"take 5", otherwise you come back to a script that says "error" and there goes hours of work!!! Yeah...you guessed it, I learned this the hard way...twice!!! : )

It is a fun program, but after my own experience and talking to a few students...there is a serious problem with their coding or something because it gives you an error message a lot...and there appears to be no rhyme or reason to it.

Anyways, I learned quickly how difficult it is to create animated characters that express the exact emotions that I wanted. This was particularly difficult because there was a limited number of gestures to choose from (there's no actual walking motion or interaction with other characters - like shaking hands or hugging).

The funny thing was I had to be creative with gestures and quickly learned that certain gestures can apply for different scenarios. I didn't always know which ones to use and so there's definitely a learning curve with that.

I found myself having to go back and edit a lot because the gestures (or lack of) looked funny or the timing was off.

This was good lesson in movie making and editing for me...learned a bit about patience too.

Sorry, my "movie" is a bit short and blah in content (and a couple of actions are a bit off in its timing), but I finally lost my patience after losing the other one I really liked! Oh well, more playing in the future!

Here's my first movie...not ready for YouTube yet!!!