Project 3: Talkin' it up

 Working with dialogue is not super fun, but I have to say, I really enjoyed the outcome of this piece! Initially when planning out this piece, I knew I had to keep the characters simple because I lip syncing the dialogue would be time-consuming. And boy was I right! After establishing my little blob people, I settled on a line from the cringe-y Netflix film, 365 Days. The line "are you lost, baby girl" is iconic, and deeply contrasts the sweet innocent blob people with the creepy vibes. When drawing the mouth to match the dialogue, I referred to my very own mouth and really tried to emphasize the movements so it would translate better in the animation. Overall, I think I really like the piece because while it is simple in design, it's pretty funny, and therefore I really enjoyed the process! If I had to go back, I might add a few more boils to the character and color it in! 

Assignment 7: The Puppet

Oooooooooweeeeeee. This one was a doozy! Watching the lectures and understanding the concept of puppets, I really thought this was going to be an easy one! However, I've said time and time again that I just don't have the natural knack for animation. I think it's important to know the natural movement of the body and how each part of the body reacts to the other. For this piece, I took inspiration from Adventure Time and animated a Riccardio type character. A heart with limbs, I made "Riccardio" do a little performance, lifting his legs up and down, almost like a ballerina, finishing off with a surprise, tiny arms that were hidden all this time, lifting up from behind to make an appearance. Overall, I do think my piece was very stiff. I struggle to come up with other movements because I was still a little unsure on how to execute the puppet with more flow. Overall, not my best work, but I'm not extremely mad about it! 

Project 2: Walkin' on "Sunshine"

 In this project, we had to create our very own walk cycle. I was beyond excited because I felt like throughout the entire semester, I was struggling to create walk cycles for characters that were not human. For example, I had created a walk cycle for a flour-sack  and a caterpillar  but I felt like I missed a lot of crucial points in each walk cycle because my characters did not have the conventional anatomy of a bipedal entity. Therefore, I was looking forward to this project because now I would have a systemic way to go about animating walks. While planning this piece I knew I did not want to put a lot of detail in the character itself so as to be able to focus on their walk. I chose a sunny day on the beach and tried to create a walk that was a bit more aggressive and standoffish to reflect the character's nature. It was interesting to see how the walk cycle and the environment could be manipulated to modify the length of the walk cycle. For example, at the beginning, my character moved across the screen until they reached the center, where I kept them until right before the end of the video. To show their movement over time, i placed a wooden pole in the middle of the sea that moved from the right end to the left end of the screen until it finally left the scene to show the character moving forward. Overall I think I did a decent job executing  the walk I had planned for my character and I can't wait to get started on pieces that experiment with other kinds of walks.

Project 1: Caterpillar vs. Flower

Because the objective of this assignment was to portray weight, the possibilities are endless. I finally decided to animate what I think would be the relationship between a teeny-weeny caterpillar and it's food of choice, flower petals. It became apparent to me very quickly that this would be a longer animation than the ones that I have done in the past because I knew I wanted to  create a slower narrative that drew out the expressions and emotions of the caterpillar throughout its efforts to conquer the flower. At the very beginning, I had to create a sort of walk cycle that the caterpillar would follow to move throughout the frame. I then moved onto the struggle between the caterpillar and the flower, more specifically the caterpillar trying to push the flower down to reach the petals. At the very end, because I was quite exhausted from how much animation I had already done, I decided to show the caterpillar fainting from exhaustion, in defeat. As a video art student, I love to play around with angles and therefore incorporated a couple of panning shots and zoom shots to bring more variety to the piece. Overall, while this assignment was much more arduous and time-consuming than most of the other pieces I've created, I really enjoyed the whole process of it.

Assignment 6: Turnin' Heads

 In this assignment, we were assigned to create an animation for a head turn. Initially, I felt the assignment would be a piece of cake. I have experience drawing faces and I find human anatomy more easy to render than say, animals or various objects. However, my over-confidence resulted in the lack of attention to detail, more specifically, volume control. The "meat" of the head-turn, struggled to hold consistency in the facial features of the character I created. This can be seen in the eyebrows, the nose, and the chin of the character. I was more focused on providing a range of expressions in the character, rather than the movement, which I now know to pay closer attention to moving forward. Overall, I did learn quite a bit from this piece and will apply this new knowledge to future animations.