I chose
these three school, Sheridan, Cambrian, St. Clair because they hall have a
specialized course in animation which is what I plan on heading into for
post-secondary. It’s also they this school are recognized for theirs art and
animation.
I wanted to
make a simple and straight forwards and simple look and design, as I
had to include three different schools. With each of these schools having
a simple cleaning looking surface interface.
I am Susan Ta, a girl on her last year of high school and I’ll soon be heading to a career I hope I can be proud to say. I personally tend to work more traditionally with pencil and the occasional watercolour but soon will be able to say I can do more. I might be a sounding a little cocky when I say this, but I dare say that I’m pretty well rounded when it comes to working both traditional means and technical programs.
It’s sad to say that I’ll be leaving CyberARTS in less than a month’s time and I’m going to miss that sweet freedom to make and do our own projects using the things I could never get my hands on otherwise. And the classes (well at the time I joined) are small and you tend to get to know and get along with everyone in the class since it’s just so small, I’ve always been more at ease in the class know that I could never suffocate in such an overcrowded classroom, like normal classes which hold around twenty kids at least and that’s more than I can handle being around.
The things I’ve learn in this course are many and surprising for both classes I can say that I have pushed at my limit at least once and I may have possibly broken through to a new level and now I want to keep moving and keep breaking limits even if I have to do some crazy projects that everyone thinks I’m insane for doing. In the end I guess I can stay that I stopped being so hard on myself and started to just learn, going from ‘I can’t do that’ to ‘I haven’t practiced that yet’.
As such for the tech side the animation was a huge step for me, it’s something I want to go into and now I finally have a taste for what it’s kind of like to make an animation – well, for doing it solo. And it drove me nuts and to the point of burning myself out, completely destroyed my sleeping scheduled and badly disturbing my already poor eating habits, and becoming horribly sleep deprive and constantly stressed but you know, it turned out pretty good just being able to watch you own creation move about the screen is just so satisfying I can’t say I wouldn’t do it again even if I have to walk through hell and back again (it’s funny to think that this is the sort of career I’m gunning for). For art side of the course I have to say that my Black and White + One painting was a huge step for me, with that painting I took every single step out of my comfort zone and I has so many problem with it when it came to hanging and now that I think about it definitely could have done that better but in the end it still turned out pretty well for something that just jabbed at almost every weak point I had.
I want to say that I’ve improved and I want to say that I am on the right track and I going to make and survive through this crazy mess I’ve gotten myself into but I can say that I’ve got thing done and I have things to prove myself at the very least that maybe I am maybe I can make it.
Fox on
the Hill is a small animation studio that works in short film and assist larger
companies in make animations in larger projects, typically working in a fairly
cartoony style. Fox on the Hill is quirky, mischievous and a relaxed studio,
much like our little fluffy mascot fox. I wanted to give it an cheerful look
with a pale orange to not hurt the eyes yet still give it that popping feeling,
with the colour orange being a colour that generally people associated with
cheerfulness. And the minimalistic look gives it a clean edge look, which is
what I general prefer as a personal preference.
For the
items I chose to use being a stuffed animal fox and a flashlight that
silhouette the logo. The fox stuffed animal was intended for children since the
studio will most likely gear towards young children and it also doubles as
showing off out fluffy mascot in an appealing way. The flashlight was used
since I wanted to do something no one has ever done; I have never seen some one
advertise on the light of a flashlight, and I’d also like to say that it’s a
throw back to old animations projected onto white screen and done with lights. I
wanted to show on outside of the box think but show a cheerful childish side.
The concept of the animation was to take a ben of fairytales
although the animation itself hardly scratched the surface of the concept with
it being only the beginning of the story. As such the story starts off with a
sort of spin on Rapunzel with the tower and everything dealing with a type of
plant that one shouldn’t be eating, and runs along the base of the original
story of Rapunzel though the whole story while mixing other fairytales as well
as creating a commentary on others.
Through the course of creating this project I was expecting
to use only Photoshop and After Effects, but Paint Tool Sai has unexpectedly
come into play. Photoshop was used for the bulk of the base animation, Sai for
a more cleaning outline look as well as colouring, and After Effects for
stitching everything together and placing down effects and checking for the
exact timing of every short clip that was to be used. These three programs were
used since they were probably my best options in terms of accessibility to what
I was doing. I also wanted to learn how to use After Effects, develop deeper
into animating on Photoshop, and show off that I have the ability to work with
many programs.
I had many, upon many problems while working on this
project; I could list half the problems now and it could go on forever. The
main problem I will state is that files would corrupt on me fairly often or the
programs would crash on me while I was working which caused me to lose so much
precious work and I dare say that I may have possibly actually finished the
storyboard’s original plan had it been for many files containing raw animations
corrupting and becoming unusable and me spending a good hour or two try to
retrieve and salvage what was left of the corrupted files.
Working After Effects was a problem in itself seeing as I
walked into this project intending to use After Effects but have absolutely no
prior knowledge to how to use the program – I didn’t even know how the program
was setup to look like pasted the loading image. But now that I’ve sat down
watched one or two tutorials and fiddled around in the program I’d say that I’m
pretty comfortable with it and I have a basic grasp on how to use it.
Lip-syncing is also very awkward especially since there is
no sound coming from anywhere and yet I need to show they were taking so it
both felt awkward and difficult to try and make their lips match up to the
words which also caused me to make a bunch od funny faces at myself trying to
get the proper mouth movement al also caused my family to think I’m insane.
If there’s anything that should be known about animation;
its that it’s very, very repetitive
and they steps actually don’t sound to hard on paper or when you say it, in
fact they look very easy but once you get down to it those easy step end up
looking daunting when you realize that you have to do it over 400 times. When
you start with storyboard -one my favorite steps- I had to make sure it was
fairly short since I need to remind myself that I was doing all of this solo. Raw
animation in Photoshop with had steps within steps of key framing, testing key
frame movements; drawing in between frames to smooth it out testing timing
again then placing in more in between frames and testing that out and repeating
the adding in between process until smooth and stratified. Once the raw I done
it’s sent to Sai and redrawing lines for a smooth clean look, colouring in
every frame, and creating a shade animation that would move along with the
animation people. Then it moves to After Effects for proper timing and possibly
sent back to Photoshop for adjustments. Again, it’s a repetitive process with
just one second of movement coloured shaded and properly timed taking around 9
to 8 hours to make.
I had have many inspiration with most coming from internet
shorts and small freelance animators that share their story and how they went
about making their creations. It’s the fuel that kept me going knowing that
it’s possible to do it with the programs I have now. So why not start now.
The whole of the animation came out decently for a first
time large animation project that was done on a short time constraint since I’m
use to doing less then 5 seconds worth of animation. But I know it could have
been dome better, it could have been smoother and less stiff. The people in the
animation seem to stiff to move sometimes and the flow of the overall thing
could have been better but that might be because the animation actually isn’t
finished and abruptly stop midway through the storyboard. That I ended up burning
myself out by the end of it so the end may look sloppier then the rest of the
animation which bugs me. But in all it was a good start to animation seeming as
this is the first time I’ve ever got to work with proper programs that could
handle these types of projects.
