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!!!

After Effects is a kicker...

...in the butt, I should say.  But it's so freakin' awesome!!!

I spent a good 2 hours trying to teach myself some things through an online AE tutorial, and honestly I don't know why I didn't start doing this earlier.  It's so much more hands-on than just reading the textbook and I don't get intimidated whenever the teacher just whips through complicated lingo like 'anchorpoints' and 'pre-comps' like I've heard of these things before.  =)  It's an advanced class, so I should've known better, but at least this is helping me understand Graphic Design terminology!  

Here's what I worked on today, basically consisting of layered lighting effects, particle wave manipulation, and typography.

  

=D

No really, I love this.  I love it all.

my animation midterm!

This was all done in Adobe Flash, using mainly frame-by-frame animation and classic "tweening" for movement of the characters.  We had to do a 9 second story, complete with action and character development.  Tammy Mouse is a character I created for a coworker of mine, and it started as a simple inside joke made through a series of comics.  I thought it would be fun to go the next step!   I fixed a bit of the layering issues (won't tell you where!) by the time I turned this thing in, and I'm so proud of it!

All art and voice-overs done by me.  Approx. time for completion?  A week and a half.

Crazyness...

I've been in such a comic-making frenzy lately, partially because the job and my class combined have made me super exhausted that drawing makes me relax... and partially because it's helped me understand the human condition that comes with animation!

It's what I learned in class a couple weeks ago.  Animation is nothing without putting actions and feelings into your characters.  Sometimes you can only do this with a few frames, and storyboarding your character into different facial expressions bring out the most subtle hints of characterization and personality.

Take this image for example.  It's two characters, with two simple poses and two facial expressions.  You don't need to know them personally or understand what's been going on in the story to get a hint of how they're feeling.  Ranait is looking outward, her arm raised up nervously - clearly feeling out of her comfort zone - while the Bunny looks to her curiously, as if in a daze.  That's what I love about comics & animation.  You don't have to read much dialogue or exposition in order to feel a connection with these characters.  Right now I'm working on mastering the art of lip-synching into animated faces, and that brings out a whole new level into the human condition.  It's really tedious to match the mouths with the sounds in audio, but when you get the final result... it's so rewarding!

I've also been making one-shot comics about my job.  =) Here's one I recently did about my girls in the residence hall:

(The one opening the door is me.)  Can you guess how each of the girls are feeling?