Project 1 / Rock Meet Hammer

I wanted my machine to be stopped by a large rock and then see what my machine would try to do to get past it. I wanted the machine to try to nudge it to try to move it but when it failed it would bring out the hammer to destroy the rock instead of trying to go around it.

Project 2 / Morphing Bunny

This animation is slightly different than my original idea. It changed due to a mistake that I made when I was uploading Adobe Illusrator files into After Effects. I uploaded the different bunnies as a nested file instead of individual files. When I found the bunny changing color I thought it was cool and changed my animation based on the color changing bunny. I thought the bunnies would all be thinking about carrots, after all what else is a bunny thinking of? As the one bunny started to change colors the others would slowly notice and it would shock them enough to stop thinking about carrots, while the color changing bunny wouldn't know why the others are looking at him they way they are. I wanted the color scheme for the background to be simple but using bright colors. I then wanted to have each bunny a different color. I created them using the same dimensions in Illustrator but using different colors so they could be told apart easily. When I imported the files into After Effects I changed the dimensions of the bunnies slightly to give each of them more of an individual look. I also placed them in different areas to try to give the illusion of depth.

Project 3 / Elevator Muzak

I wanted to have an elevator that played music that it thought would be apporiate for each passenger. Even though the music might not really match each passenger the elevator would play the song it thought would match even though the song probably might not truly match. I originally had more songs and the type of passenger that I would match to. I could have used Adobe Photoshop but I didn't want to try to cut up pictures and having everything look too different from each other so I built all of my characters in Adobe Illustrator. By using Illustrator my characters and props could have a very stylized look but unfornuntely I didn't like the way some of the passengers were turing out so I scrapped them and the songs and I ended up using only two songs. For each passenger I was able to also match the hallways where they were leaving and entering the elevator to match as well so it reflected each of the passengers. I kept wanting to add little details to further enhance the overall animation, such as the ding for the elevator doors opening when it reached the floor. Although I wasn't able to place all of the effects into it that I wanted to.

Project 4 / Death by Latin

You know how it seems like all tv, movies, comic books, video games, books, and whatever else there is with monsters (and no not the oh so sparkly ones) they hero uses Latin to kill the threat. Who knew that a dead language was so powerful. So that is what I based this animation on. I wanted to use some monsters and kill them with Latin. Even more the monsters are cute and cuddly and still that does not save them from emanate death. I wanted to use a variety of fonts and use different effects as well to convey the message of the animation and the point that I wanted to get across. The music that I used was a Gregorian chant. I edited it down from the original length to try to establish the mood of terror for the monsters. The chant is done in Latin as well so when the monsters hear it they know that death is knocking on the door for them. The best part of the killer Latin is the phrases is actually silly phrases that normally would make them laugh and shake their heads but since they are done in Latin they become super deadly.

Final Project / Wonderful world of Shapes

Ah shapes they come in all kinds of umm shapes. With this animation project I wanted to use just shapes. I thought that would be a pretty cool animation if it could be done properly. So without the use of characters can shapes primarily be used successfully? The next step in the project was what kind of shapes to use, I wanted to use a simple shapes that you can just use from the shape tool box and nothing else. So no random shape from the pencil tool Take that!! Even with simple shapes you can use them to create an interesting effect. It is random but awesome at the same time. With great randomness comes great stuff. Even the colors I chose were complementary in scheme to tie it together. I didn't put in audio in this project mainly because I couldn't chose a piece of music that I thought would fit. I thought a piece from Moby or maybe the Chemical Brothers would be a proper choice for the last portion of the animation but not the beginning. I think the overall effect worked in just using simple shapes for the animation project. So shapes are indeed wonderful.