Heat Haze

LilliesoftheValley

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.