Project 1 / The Toy Store Massacre

The idea of this animation started with wanting to do a claw machine with toys or some other figures. I omitted the claw machine and kept the idea for the toys, deciding to put them in a toy store. I decided to use a teddy bear for the main figure in the animation, adding other toy elements such as the car, ball, and toy soldiers. I wanted to teddy bear to be the cause of the other elements moving so it would be more of a mechanical reaction. As it moved, I wanted the backgrounds to change to make it seem like the teddy bear was moving to other parts of the toy store. The ending is the most important part of the animation. I wanted there to be craziness and chaos once everything collided. I also added the bounce to the last toy soldier for a little comedy. As I finished up the project, I decided to add extra movements to the bear, since it is the main focus to the animation. I masked its arms and feet and made them move. I had some problems with the movement of the arms so they do not move in sync with each other. Next time, I am going to rely on parenting objects more. The feet move almost in sync, but they are not as noticeable in the animation. I also don’t really like the movement of the backgrounds. Next time I think I will draw the background and make it continuous so it is not switching from one picture to another. The purpose of this animation was not to make or break something, just to cause disorder and to move the objects in a mechanical manner. I would characterize this machine as eratic and uncaring toward the elements in it. The purpose is also to be comical and amusing. I think I was successful with that.

Project 2 / The Levels of Evil

The original idea for this animation was to look into the apartments of the characters, showing their strange inner selves. I thought of some strange ideas; a room full of dolls, a serial murderer, even a superhero at one point. As I filtered through my ideas, I decided that instead of looking into just the general personal lives of these people, I wanted to show the evil sides of them. The mad scientist was one of my original ideas, even before I decided to just do evil deeds. All of us have a bit of a crazy side to us, which I wanted to reflect in this evil scientist. I left the use of the potion a mystery for a reason. I want the viewer to decide for themselves what the potion does. Does it cause a widespread disease through the population? Does it turn a person into a cockroach? It could do anything. I also put it at the top level of the evil deeds because whatever the potion does could make this evil worse than all the others. It might not though. The burglar is a common evil, especially in cities. The tall buildings show that this animation takes place in a city. The burglar represents the envy that everyone has. Everyone envies someone or something at least once in their lives, wanting something they cannot have, like money or jewelry. But it is not evil unless they act on this envy and take what they want, which is what this burglar did. The two fighters represent the anger is all of us. Everyone gets so angry at some point that they want to punch someone in the face. These two fighters are acting on that anger violently, making it an evil deed. The last scene with the babies is the lowest level of evil in my animation. It is an innocent evil. Neither of the children want to share their toy. How many people really like to share though? We want to keep our hard earned prized possessions to ourselves, even if sharing is the right thing to do. These levels of evil are very simplified and leave a lot for the viewer to interpret. It also gives a humorous view to the evil that all of us have within ourselves.

Project 3 / Geometric Wars

I started out with just ideas of animating simple geometric shapes because I wanted to focus on the audio. I wanted the animation to be comical. I finally came up with the idea to have them go to war against each other and killing each other off. This animation can have a few metaphorical meanings, but my main idea is about different cultures fighting and destroying each other then going on happily with their lives. I tried to find some kind of personality with each shape. The circles were the first shaped I focused on. These organic shapes are not sharp and do not seem dangerous so I made their personalities seem innocent and childlike. They showed that they had an evil side when they attacked the square. The sharper the shapes got, the more dangerous I made them. I didn’t come up with the stars until toward the end of the animation. I only wanted the circles, square, and triangles at first. The stars added another level to the geometric wars and added to the comedy of it as well. The stars were my favorite part of the animation because I loved making the crazy eyes on them and the part of the animation with them dancing was the most fun to animate. The point of this animation was for the audio. I tried to make the audio fit with the animation well and make the animation more entertaining at the same time. The spring sound at the beginning over exaggerates the bounce, but makes it funnier in my opinion. I did not like the growl that the circles made because I wanted it to be more high pitched. At first, I wanted to use different songs for them to dance to. I wanted the circles to have childlike music, the triangles to have normal techno music, and the stars to have hard rock music. As I got toward the end of the animation, the different music just did not fit in well with the animation, so I decided to just use one fun dance song. There were a couple sounds that I wanted to add to it that just got omitted, like an evil laugh for the square.

Project 4 / Discord from the Heart

The point of this project is to emphasize how simple emotions can affect our lives so drastically. A person can start out with one emotion and it can change to the complete opposite in seconds. We go through so many emotions in just one day and they affect our day the most. Emotions are what compel us to do crazy things. This project covers just a few of the emotions that all of us go through. I started out with showing the word chaos because of the discord that emotions cause to our lives. Emotions can take over our thoughts and keep us from being rational with our actions and words. Love and hate are the first emotions I showed because, in my opinion, these are the most powerful emotions. I added some of the other very important and broad emotions; such as happiness, anger, and sorrow. I added the opposites to all these emotions because I wanted to show how many emotions a human is capable of. Just these emotions are broad terms that can be split up in a variety of even more emotions. As I was looking through different emotions, I was finding images of simple smiley faces that expressed these emotions. This gave me the idea for the images that I have in the background. I wanted to make simple figures that focused on the emotions being expressed, rather than the complexity of the figures. At the end, I decided that I wanted to add a quote to try to show the view of what I wanted for this project. The quote by Vincent Van Gogh reflected my view for the project perfectly and I think it wrapped up the animation nicely.

Final Project / Imagination Come to Life

The imagination of a child makes anything possible. In their minds, children create mythological creatures, invisible beings, even bring toys to life. Toys are a child’s best friend in their early years of life. Toys are there to comfort them and stimulate their learning interest with games and music. So what if these toys were really brought to life? Each toy would have its own personality and goals. They each play a role in the animation, some more than others. The bunny is the first character out. She is the daredevil of the group. She prefers to stay out in the open instead of hiding out in the closet or trunk. The rest of the toys are afraid of the rocking horse, but she isn’t. Jack in the Box is my second toy. He is the jerk of the group. He pops out and scares the other toys for fun and enjoys bothering them whenever he can. Mr. Teddy is the muscle head of the toys. He has a quick temper and is very athletic. The last toy, Caterpillar, does not really give a damn about anything. He prefers to sit around glowing and listening to music. It is the imagination of the creepy baby that creates all these toys, but his imagination can get out of control very easily. The personalities of the toys take over and there is chaos.