animation 2D final

Fireflies

I apologize for not updating for an entire month, but life has been pretty busy.  The girls are getting ready for final exams, and we've been preoccupied with ordering group sweatpants, exchanging Secret Santa, and of course making Christmas/holiday gifts in our brand new craft room!   I'm going the extra mile and making fabulous jewelry gift for the girls this year... and it's taken quite a bit of time to get them done!

And of course, my animation semester is almost over!  Over Thanksgiving break I played around with Adobe After Effects some more, and if there's anything I learned about mastering a new tool, you gotta learn to have fun with it.  I managed to master this wonderful lighting and particle effect for something I might actually use for my final project.  Speaking of which... I haven't mentioned it yet:  my class final will consist of animating/illustrating at least 30 seconds of a song.  I chose Fireflies by Owl City - such a wonderful synth-pop feel-good song!  For the past two weeks I've been doing all these sketches of my characters and an (amazing) background, but I still have so much to finish by next Tuesday.

The story goes that these three kids are playing marbles in a narrow city street, and one of them catches sight of some fireflies (which is very unusual in a city).   Immediately the boy gets excited and free-spirited, chasing the fireflies with the other kids.  By the end of the segment, we realize the boy was just day-dreaming, but nevertheless he begins to leave the marbles game to seek out the fireflies in the distance.  The other two kids just watch very confusingly, but then decide to follow along.

Here's a "screen shot" of the final scene:

I'm super excited about this project, but it definitely took a lot more time planning and story-boarding than I had initially expected.  I've concluded that the best part is sketching out ideas and bringing out the characters' personalities through their facial expressions.  The nitty gritty comes with putting in the frame-by-frame action sequences and visual effects (like the fireflies - which I haven't even animated yet!)   I'm glad I delved into After Effects and Flash this semester, but I would love to master more illustration software in the spring to polish those basic coloring skills.  =)

Oh!  And The Princess and the Frog comes out tomorrow!!!