Project 1 / Bottle Opener

The wheel begins rolling, and bumps into a nearyby bowling ball; which happens to be decorated with everyone's friendly neighborhood spiderman. The "floor" that everything is on top off was surprisingly the easiest part of the animation, probably because I was able to see a guidline of where they need to be at each particular moment. The bowling ball rolls down a hill, hits a hammer and activates a sleeping walking-bot. The walking robot takes a short stroll and comes across a Duracell battery. The part with the walking robotwould definately be the hardest part of the animation because getting the legs to move and look somewhat fluid and natural was frustrating and time comsuming.It preceded to kick the battery, causing it to fall down off of cliff right into iRobot. The Duracell battery powers the iRobot so that it may use its laser vision to blow off the cap on the nearby CokaCola; because everyone knows that the robots must follow the 3 laws.

 

Project 2 / Sir Isaac Newton's Thought Process

This project was significantly harder for me to get started, mostly because I didn't really want to do another machine (like in project 1) but could only think of machines until this one. Once I came up with the Isaac Newton and his apple idea though, I stuck with my original thought pretty closely (zooming on in his brain after the apple lands on the ground). There were a couple significant changes that I made earlier though. The first one was the first zoom effect because I originally wanted to zoom in on the apple, but convinced myself otherwise because the apple isn't really the main focus. My next change was a bigger change, and located at the end with the man and the electrical plug. My first plan was to place a building on the brain and zoom into that and have a bunch of panicing "brain cell people" but I had trouble finding images that would be useable, and look nice with the rest of the composition. Probably my favirote part of making this animation would be the brain scene, part of the reason being because I was able to use the lightning effect and I probably won't find another good use for it in future animations.

 

Project 3 / Zombie Movie Trailer

As soon as I learned that our third project would be audio, I had a good idea what I was going to do. It started off as an actual episode of some made up TV show but then I learned that that would take way too long to do in three weeks. Then I got the suggestion to cut it up and make it into a movie trailer, that way I can basically do the same idea, but it would take less time and may be a little easier. As I was working on the project I ran into a couple challenging points such as maybe not being able to draw something needed or the lack of a scanner nearby. I overcame these by finding images similar to what I needed on the internet and I believe they worked out just fine.

 

Project 4 / Be Nice To Clippy

The only way to get something done is to actually do it. That sentence motivated me to get this project done, and you could even say that that sentence gave me the idea for this project. This project was a difficult one for me to get started on because it took me awhile of some hard thinking to come up with an idea to fit the criteria of a text based animation. And then one day, while I was thinking, I came up with the idea of 'nothing' (which has probably been done before) and with some tweaking I eventually got to the final project you see above. My original idea was similar to this because it started out with Microsoft Word, but instead of Clippy coming in, it would just keep typing and erasing to give the allusion that the student is having trouble with brainstorming (similar to an actual experience). I eventually came up with the idea to have Clippy in the animation instead becaues while I was looking for images of Microsoft Word, I came across a bunch of the paper clip images and spoofs of him. As for incorporating the text based animation criteria, I put descriptive words throughout my animation to help give the viewer a better understanding of my animation. For example, in the beginning you'll notice that I added a section where a word in the bottom corner continuously changes. I did this because It was supposed to give the viewer an idea of what the 'student' in my animation was feeling at certain points.

 

Final Project / Game Over

I've had the idea for this animation for quite awhile, and very few parts of it ended up changing from my original idea. The hardest part for me was coming up with an interesting conclusion to this piece. I've had several parts of ideas but none of them were complete. I eventually decided to have a bunch of small clips displayed together one after another, but soon after decided to scrap that idea and go with a bunch of mario clips in one frame. Overall I felt that this project turned out pretty well, but the part the turned out really well would be the first scene with the NES and it being opened. I believe that I did a good job because the scene looks and flows very smoothly. Lastly, as for the realistic hands, I chose to use real hands because I liked the contrast between the cartoony background and the hands because it helped make them stand out and bring intrest to the viewer.