Project 1 / Coffee Monster

In this animation the unsuspecting stickman Louis pokes a ball he finds on the street and gets eaten by and evil coffee machine monster. Originally the monster was a combination of different machines but I simplified him to a ball that morphs into a strange-looking coffee maker I found online for time's sake since I would be animating a humanoid form. I ended up simplifying things quite a bit more than I had wanted to, especially when it came to Louis because I'm still rather clunky with the controls in After Effects. Once I finally got the concept of musing masks to animate a single piece things ran a lot smoother. I feel that I still had a lot to do in way of editing for smoothness in character movements and timing but I'm happy with the fact that the overall animation came together in the end. I think that the most difficult thing I did was create a walk cycle; I never did get the timing for the left and right legs of the stick man to seem exactly right, but I'll chalk that up to the fact that I had to simplify him to the point of not having knee joints. At the end I was supposed to have another stick person begin to walk towards the ball that turns into the coffee machine, but due to lack of time I felt that I wouldn't be able to create a new character and animate it sufficiently, but I feel that the ending I have now is pretty good.

Project 2 / Cyclic....Bird!

Well, the basic idea behind Cyclic...Bird! was to create a kind of rebirth cycle. I've always been fascinated (and frustrated) by patterns that have no true beginning or end so I decided to make it loop so that I could create my own never-ending pattern.

Unlike my last animation, which involved a stick figure and a coffee machine I found online, I created every piece of this animation on Illustrator. It was a lot more time consuming to do this than to simply find and alter something on the internet, but I found a real satisfaction in creating my own characters (even if I haven't quite mastered Iullustrator enough to get the drawings I want). The amount of progress I made in exploring the tools on Illustrator makes me feel a lot more confident about the next time I have to use it as well.

Since my bird (Jeffy) was a lot more complicated than Louis the stick man, I found that I had to spend a lot more time perfecting his movements. I think my favorite accomplishment in movement in this project was getting Jeffy to bob his head and tail at the same time...I was also fond of the way I made him blink...and fly...actually, I really just liked that I could make him move. There were actually a lot more little movement details that I wanted to put in but simply didn't have the time to do so; for example, when Jeffy is landing on the fence I wanted him to hover for just a moment and land a little more gracefully, but since doing this probably would have meant that I would have to draw some new pieces for Jeffy I had to make due with what I had. It took an amazing amount of time to draw the individual wings for the flying scenes, and even longer to time out the wings correctly! Somehow, though, I feel like I did that better than my attempt at making a stick man walk.

As with every animation ever made, I feel like there are a million little things I could still tweak in this. However, I'm confident that my timing has improved a lot. I also feel like not having a stationary background the entire time added quite a bit in the movement of the story line.

Project 3 / Luv Bugs

The goal of this project was to incorporate sound in the animation so that it added something to it. This was my first time putting sound with my work, but that definately wasn't the only first for me in this project! I also developed multiple complex characters, varied expressions on the characters, created a moving background, and switched camera angles multiple times throughout this piece. The original story is very much the same as my result. The yellow bug, Sunni, begins the video happily rolling along the highway of life to a Beatles song. His pleasant day is interrupted by a hot pink car that rolls by blasting Love Game, by Lady Gaga. He tries to woo her with a Jimmy Buffet seranade, but she rejects him. Sunni mourns the loss of his pride until Crayola, a little blue bug based on my own car, brightens his day. Originally the music in this piece was supposed to be strickly background music, but as I was working on it I thought it might be a better idea if the music came from the cars themselves. Even better, I thought, if the cars used this music to communicate with each other. This was a far more interesting idea than simply having them honk at one another as I had been planning on to begin with. While deciding on which songs to use I considered having the VWs only play Beatles songs since I'm a big Beatles fan myself, but I decided that was too restrictive and that the female characters would be more effective if they were playing songs featuring female vocalists. Two of Sunni's songs are Beatles songs, though, because I couldn't pass it up. There are a few other sound effects throughout the video, all of which were gathered online. I found one radio adjusting noise, one car-passing zoom, one car screeching away, and a number of other sounds on a free website. Although they aren't totally necessary to the video I feel like these little details have added a lot. In the end I'm extremely pleased with this project from start to finish. I gave myself enough time to animate and clean, and even add in some extra details like the words at the end which I hadn't planned on doing. One of my favorite things about this piece is the fact that it can be interpreted in a number of ways, but I won't tell you which way it should be so you can decided for yourself.

Project 4 / Skin-deep Love

The basic idea behind this project was to create a text-based animation, but it was preferred that the text used not be a sentence. So, I dissected a poem I wrote called Skin-deep Love and used only the key words to narrate a short story. For the actual animation I wanted a very gestural, gritty feel that would help portray how messy love can be when it goes bad. All of the images are hand-drawn with a tablet and the letters were traced over for a sketchy look. To really add to the mood, I inversed the images and letters so that they became white lines on a black background instead of the other way around. Originally I was going to have the characters moving a lot more throughout the animation, and there were several images that I had to cut out for the sake of completing the animation on time. I have to say, though, that the image I’m most proud of is the final one where Nora’s hair is blowing ever so slightly in the wind. The music choice is also something that I feel turned out pretty well. I decided early on that I would use a song without lyrics and after a little searching decdied that a violin would be the best instrument to use to portray the mood. The music you hear throughout the piece is actually one three-minute song cut up and blended to fit nicely into about fourty seconds of animation. Overall I’m pleased with Skin-deep Love. I really liked the feeling of working with a tablet instead of a mouse because it gave me a lot more freedom of creation.

Final Project / Mommy, Where do Robots Come From?

This video is intended to be the rough draft for a commercial for Mom's Friendly Robot Company. Since this company has a monopoly over the robot production all over the world, it's probably best to just pay into their offer so that the next time your robot gets updated he or she doesn't decide to kill all humans. The lovely little girl in the beginning, Tiffany, may seem innocent at first, but she has a dark side; turns out she's actually a robot herself which makes sense since she addresses her mother in the video.

I intended for this animation to keep its hand-drawn appearance from the very start. Each image is actually drawn three times and rotated for the extra sketchy quality. One of my main goals for this project was to lipsinc a character, although I intened to do it to music I still accomplished this goal with a voice recording. All voice recordings were done by me, with alterations on the beginning and end ones, of course. Overall I feel like the slightly creepy quality of the altered voices works well with the somewhat scary movie quality of the drawings and the happy music behind it helps to set the mood in an off kilter kind of way.