I sketch my ideas for animations in my sketchbook and many of the ideas that come to me are for 2D animations. I have decided to make that my main focus for this quarter. However, I am also very open to 3D animations as they come more naturally to me since drawing is not my strongest area. Nevertheless, for this project I picked up a drawing I made a year ago and tested it out in Photoshop to see how it looked. I have fallen in love with my little monster and I am looking forward to seeing what I can accomplish. The sketches below show the four main frame stages of this animation. I am going to start adding as many frames as I can in-between these stages to make the animation look smooth and fluid. I plan to animate the tail moving as he moves towards his food and perhaps adding some squash and stretch when he jumps. In the end it will probably look something like this:
-standing at neutral -sees the cookie flower -anticipates a jump -jumps through the air and lands next to the flower -anticipates a large bite -chows down on the flower and ends with some chewing
Some photos of the concept art for the main four frames of the animation.
I am mostly inspired by Disney movies but there are short films that I have found on YouTube that I am also aspiring to be. Here is a link to my YouTube animation/special effects inspiration playlist:
Overall this year I want to gain experience in all forms of animation, particularly 3D because rigging fascinates me but also working on making my 2D animations appear more smooth and flowing. I want to also experiment with stop-motion to see if that could be something to pursue in a future project. Finally, I hope to receive an opportunity to experience the mechanisms and methods to motion-capture because that is also very intriguing to me.
This last project took about a two weeks to complete. We started with an introduction to the project (listing the requirements), followed by a few examples from previous years for reference. Then, we gathered into groups to start bouncing ideas off of each other. One of our first ideas was a space theme, which we liked the best. After making a list of many other ideas we decided to rank our favorites and combine the best into one film. Once we agreed on the basic storyline, we got to work on the storyboards and scripts. We started filming two days later, getting half of the film finished then. We edited these clips before filming the other half of the film. Editing and rendering took about three and a half days.
Reflection
Takeaways
Technology wise, I learned how to organize and manipulate files on my computer for maximum efficiency. I also learned how to use After Effects to export and render works as well as add special effects by importing files. A major thing I learned is how keyframes work and the amount of calculations that go into making them so precise. By working on personal projects, I became more familiar with the different tools in Photoshop such as smudge, dodge and burn. In After Effects and Photoshop, I practiced with the pen tool and found how useful it is when creating masks and selecting very specific areas to edit. Some challenges I faced during this year was accidentally moving files and getting them accidentally deleted from a project. From this I learned to NEVER move anything in your computer until you are finished with a project, just in case. Saving Multiple copies is also really important. If you are making a change that you are not totally sure about, save it as a copy so that you can go back if you need to. Frequent saving can also be a lifesaver in case of program crashes. These skills will help me in my future years as an animator.
Fire that I illustrated in Photoshop. I used
the blur and smudge tools to give the effect of
heat and the detail of the flames.
I created my own profile picture in Maya.
Using my knowledge about lighting, I created
dramatic spotlights shining inside spherical room
toward my initial.
I also started making my own YouTube
channel banner. While this is still
and unfinished project, you can see my
use of layers to create two hills of grass and
a raven sitting in the leaves.
Collaborationand Communication was something that really came into play these last few weeks while working on our final projects. This was our first group project of the year and it was a lot of fun to put our different areas of expertise together to make something spectacular! In our group we split up the work to compliment each others best areas. For example, Brianna did the 2D art of the project, Andi did the 3D work, and I did special effects and music/sound effects. Other projects this year did implement collaboration as well. My friend and I talked about ideas for e-Magine next year and we helped each other develop stories for our animated short films earlier this year.
My Short Film Animation
It is important to learn these skills while we are still young and in school because of how much communication is required to succeed in adult life. Professional animators don't do everything by themselves! A large team is required to make a great movie. I enjoy working with people and the openness of my classmates have really made animation class a great place to work together and freely express our creativity.
Project Management is an important part of all classes, especially animation. While working, you must keep in mind the estimated export/render/upload time as this will likely limit the amount of days you have left to work. Getting behind is a big mistake that I luckily avoided this year. There were a few times where I got behind in class and there was the possibility of getting set back a day, but I battled this by staying after school, during lunch and coming in during seminar.
I learned a lot about Leadership during my time in e-Communication this year. Making sure that we had fun while working but still focusing on the end goal was hard at times but now I am confident with my skills in leading a group to success. In video I had a few projects where our group got distracted and it made everything harder. I worked constantly throughout the year to get better at keeping everyone in line.
Strengths and Weaknesses
My greatest strength this year were being able to channel my creativity without restriction in my work. There were guidelines we had to follow, but I never felt that there were any boundaries to what I could attempt to do with my projects. My weakness this year was making sure I stayed focused during class. The freedom to work mostly without instruction sometimes caused me to slack a bit on some days. I have overcome this by listening to music while I work to prevent me from talking as much. However, this is still something I am working on.
My Plan
With the skills I have learned this year, I plan to create multiple animations and films to submit them e-Magine next year. I want to use my experience to try for endorsement as well. I am striving to make neat and professional-looking animations that have meaningful storylines. Right now I am sketching storyboards for an animation I plan to create next year about a girl trying to manage her anxiety while in public. I also want to continue my knowledge of video production to bring more variety to my animation content. I could even experiment with a collaborative environment where both live action characters and animated characters exist. To gain more knowledge I will also get to know some upperclassmen. I was inspired by the senior showcase this year and how smooth some of the animations were; I hope to create work like this in the near future.
What I Would Change
Next year I hope to talk to my teacher more so I can learn extra tips and tricks while working on personal projects. This year I tried to add something a little extra to all of my work because I finished early. Striving to add these things led me to some more advanced skills that came in handy during later projects. As I continue in e-Communications, I hope to go above and beyond with my projects like I did this year and leading myself toward success.
Conclusion
Overall e-Comm has been great for me this year. I have really improved since freshman year and I am very excited for another year! I have met many new people through this from hiring actors to sitting next to each other in class. This program has helped me become more comfortable and find a home here at ONW. At the end of the day, I am always thankful for the opportunities I have the ability to create and learn freely at school.
Tag Line: The mystery that will change their fate.
Pre-Production
In the beginning of this project, we all wrote scripts for our own short story idea and presented them to the class. After getting into groups, we decided on whose story we would be filming and creating. My group was Katie, Tayah and Mason and we chose Katie's short film called Connected. Her film was about a brother (Jaxon) and sister (Alix) who were separated at birth and meet up at school. Upon seeing each other they experience a series of blackouts and strange dreams where they see each other inside a void. They consult each other and come to the conclusion that they might be brother and sister. The film ends with the two confronting Alix's aunt about their assumptions. She tells them that it is true but they were never supposed to meet each other. We drew up storyboards and rewrote parts of the script before beginning filming. Katie was our director since she knew the story best and had a vision for what she wanted it to look like, Tayah was the director of photography, I was art director and Mason was the editor.
Production
After hiring all the actors, we met up over the weekend Katie's house to film the ending scenes where Alix and Jaxon come home and demand an explanation from her aunt. At school the next week we continued working backwards and got to work filming the scenes where they are researching dreams and blackouts in the library. We had to work around a few scheduling conflicts where the actors couldn't film but we got everything filmed on time. We also had to work around issues with broken equipment and used a Canon DSLR to film some scenes. Do do the scenes where Alix and Jaxon see each other in a void, we filmed in front of a green screen and Mason edited black all around them. To manage time the best, Mason worked with the clips we had already filmed and editing them together while we went out and filmed what was left. A struggle we had was moving the camera around to film different shots from a variety of different angles. Sometimes this made a scenes take a long time to film.
Post Production
We got a little behind in editing because of the order we filmed the story in. Looking back, we should have filmed the green screen room scenes first because those take the longest to edit. Overall however, everything went very smoothly in this project. The things that we learned from previous projects and applied to this one helped us to be successful here. I will remember our strengths from this project and apply them to my remaining work this year and other assignments next year.
For this project we were to make a realistic animation of a bowling ball, tennis ball, and golf ball bouncing. For accuracy, we took real video of these balls bouncing, and then recorded the height of each bounce and the frame number in Google Sheets. After modeling the balls and applying bump and color mapping, we used the graph editor to create keyframes for the bouncing. The measurements we recorded earlier helped us to make correct keyframes. Using the Graph Editor, we also edited out the ease-in and ease-out by making the bottom points linear. The final steps of this project were to set a background. To do this, we made a plane for the floor and chose a picture off of images search and set it as the background. We used the camera toggle controls to make it look like the balls were proportional to the environment and actually sitting on the floor. Lighting was the last thing to adjust.
What I Learned
During this project I learned how use the Graph Editor in Maya that allows keyframes to be made using precise measurements. I also learned how to adjust the lighting by choosing "Look Through Selected". This changes your perspective to that of the light you have selected. You can use the same camera toggle controls to move and direct your light to the position you want it. This option makes it easier to see exactly where your light is shining. Another trick I learned in this project is how to assign a new material as a background. This allowed us to take a real-life picture and place our bouncing balls inside of the setting. All of these skills will be very helpful to me in future projects. I found the "Look Through Selected" option to be the most useful because lighting is usually a bit hard for me to get right the first time.
I was very pleased with the way this project turned out and I decided to make it my top video on my YouTube channel.
For this project we designed a label for a fictional product and created it in Photoshop. Next, we modeled a container for the label to go on and applied the label we created as a texture. After adding lighting our final step was to animate the container spinning around so you can fully see the label. The label I created was for a can of candy called The Candy Man Can. I also modeled some little candies for the inside of the container.
What I Learned
During this project I learned how to use the Cylindrical Mapping tool which helped me to apply the label without the design getting stretched out and repeated unnecessarily. I also learned that design is a very big part of animation an they often come together. It was a lot of fun to make a fictional product and get to create it and make it look real! I hope that we will continue to learn more abut textures, color mapping and bump mapping in the next projects because it is really cool to make objects that look like that could be in the real world.
For our second project in Entertainment we were to create a remake trailer of a high school movie. The movie our group chose was Napoleon Dynamite. In my group I was the Production Designer so I created the storyboards and tried to make sure we filmed as accurately as possible.
Pre-Production
During our early preproduction stage we planned everything out and had a good plan on paper. We ran into conflict when we began searching for actors. Our first actor was already being used by another group and our second actor was very busy and had little time to film. Around this time we decided that for the sake of time we would use one of our group members. Since we only had a few days left and after school time was limited for our group, most of our filming was done between two days during class. This resulted in our video looking a little rushed and not fully perfected. We now know that we should pick out more than one actor ahead of time just in case and to double and triple check that they are available for all the times on the agreed schedule.
Production
Our costumes were all prepared a week or two before we settled on a final actor so that was one thing we had prepared ahead of time. We filmed everything at school except for the shots with the grandma which were filmed at the house of one of my group members. Some shots such as the tetherball scene and the scene with Trisha's dad were not included due to time restraints. We filmed a couple takes of each shot to make sure they were ok. There was one day where we filmed outside and we forgot to check the audio, another problem with this was that many of us either had incompatible earbuds (iPhone 7 or AirPods) or didn't have them at all. For these scenes we had to film a voice over to use instead of the original audio.
Post-Production
Post production was fairly simple for me as I was very familiar with the original trailer having done the storyboards but I kept the video pulled up in another tab just for a quick reference. I used QuickTime to record the text screens in between shots and then dropped them into Premiere Pro. I then used a YouTube to MP3 online converter to get the audio for the background music and the school bell sound at the beginning of the trailer. All that was left after that was making sure the audio was at the appropriate level and the shots were not cut too short or too long.
Overall this project was really a learning experience for me. I was interesting to have something professional to look off of and try to recreate it with the same amount of prestige. I think my team Collaborated well at the beginning but we started to drift apart a but as we kept hitting more bumps in the road. Even though it may not seem like it, I also think we did a good job with Project Management, we persevered through it all and found a solution and produced a decent video with what we had in the end. Communication was a small issue as some of our first actors were not in quick contact with and they misunderstood the importance of the project. Leadership was important in this project but I feel like we could have stepped it up a little bit. Another team member and I were mostly trying to pull everyone else along and keep going. I did a lot of outside school work and even sent reminders to those who were filming on certain days. Finally, our Technical Skills could have used a little work. I think that all of our editing was good but while filming we slacked on checking sound and focus and some shots were not at the same angle as the original trailer.
During this project, we advanced the use of our skills that we learned from other projects from this semester. We used the create polygon tool which was similar to the NURBS curve tool to create the individual snowflakes. The extrude tool was used to make the window frame and make the snowflakes three-dimensional. Bump mapping was used to make the wall and snowflakes look realistic as well. Finally, we used our knowledge of making keyframes in Maya to animate the snowflakes falling past the window. The create polygons tool was new but very similar to other tools we have used. To create a snowflake, we took one arm and created it point by point, very much like the NURBS curve tool except to make a rounded edge we had to make several points and manipulate them to roundness. We designed one arm of a snowflake and then duplicated it six times around a 380° point. After combining all six of the duplicated arms into one shape, we extruded and added color/bump mapping. We made six original snowflakes and then copied/resized them to make the rest of the snow. I really enjoyed the project although I did get a little behind in the animating stage. It took everything we have learned to a new and more complicated level and I hope we will continue to develop intricate skills such as the ones we used in this project.
