The narrative project had us delve into the process of creating an original story. We were tasked with displaying this story across multiple mediums and it tested out ability to convey the story effectively and concisely each time. In Digital Media we were tasked to create an Animation of our story, in English we wrote a short "Flash" fiction of our story, and in Design we drew up comics and eventually made them cleaner by going over their lines in illustrator.
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The jump from converting my flash fiction into animatic was not very difficult, as I had actually written my flash fiction and produced my animatic at the same time and my graphic novel was very descriptive and I had already had the settings and scenes in my head. The much larger and difficult jump however was between turning my animatic into a final animation. My animatic had similar shots but my graphic novel really didn’t use some of the shots I would use in animation. This made it a little more difficult when deciding my shots for the animation because many of the shots I have like panning shots or shots following objects were impossible to test in still drawings like my graphic novel.
The process of animation was actually much, much more tedious that I thought. I had opted to do a frame by frame animation in order to have a smoother product and one I could be more proud of, but this increased my workload heavily. Things like animating the water splashing within the water jug with frame by frame animation and the animations for the sweat and rain proved to be the most difficult. Another big problem I ran into was just the Adobe software messing up. Four times during my animation my camera was pushed off center for no reason (A problem many other in the class ran into) and multiple times my Animate window crashed while saving and I had to restart. The process however was very rewarding, as having people tell you something you spent that much time on is good is a very good feeling.
In design we started using illustrator to enhance our already drawn comic boards. We scanned our boards with an app called GeniusScan and placed it into illustrator. From there we traced our already made lines while also touching it up a bit and making it cleaner. Through this we got to make many edits and change details about our narrative even after we wrote it
My artist statement was loosely about the ones on top not knowing the problem of those less fortunate than them. Thats why in this comic I had the tree who had a perfect life above the clouds not know that he was stepping on the flowers and denying them water, but later he finds out and is able to help them
One thing I feel like I was lacking though was the complexity of my Comics story. I don’t have any real specific and grave problem with it, rather I feel like it was a bit on the simple side. This simpleness however was intentional due to the fact I wanted to make something relatively easy to animate, but I feel this caused some drawbacks while expressing this story through a comic.
An animatic is a rough video storyboard with no animation occurring yet, it is used as a tool to see how scenes functions and if they are working before they get fully animated, since animation is a rather time consuming process
Through the flash fiction, the graphic novel, and the animatic I was able to get a solid idea of what I wanted out my story and exactly what I wanted to draw, and they are heavily reflective of my final product.
The process of animation was actually much, much more tedious that I thought. I had opted to do a frame by frame animation in order to have a smoother product and one I could be more proud of, but this increased my workload heavily. Things like animating the water splashing within the water jug with frame by frame animation and the animations for the sweat and rain proved to be the most difficult. Another big problem I ran into was just the Adobe software messing up. Four times during my animation my camera was pushed off center for no reason (A problem many other in the class ran into) and multiple times my Animate window crashed while saving and I had to restart. The process however was very rewarding, as having people tell you something you spent that much time on is good is a very good feeling
The sun floats overhead, sending glistening rays of light down from the sky, reflecting off the tops of the fluffy gelatinous clouds. A tree stares off into the horizon, a shy smile and lazy eyes are plastered across his face. The sun’s rays are beating down an onslaught of heat, but the tree simply reaches into its leaves, and removes a bottle of water. He quickly drinks it and releases it from his hand, sinking into the clouds below. It is quiet. And he continues to stare. For this is all that was his life, he would walk, soak up sunlight, and drink. This had allowed him to grow healthy and tall, even he forgot what live was beneath the clouds, for it had been so long since then.
Suddenly, something flashes and glistens past his eyes… it's the bottle again! It had come back through the clouds! But how? He quickly grabs a hold of it as it come barreling towards him. As he inspects further he notices something, there seems to be shining object inside, but for what reason? This was very out of the ordinary, this was nothing like his average day, and he wanted to solve this as soon as possible, as this whole dilemma was angering him. He grabbed the glistening silver cylinder like object from the bottle. At first he did not know how it worked, but after closer examination, he found out how it functioned. It was a telescope, something he had never laid eyes on.
At first he did not know what to do, but he quickly figured out that the length of the telescope allowed him to peer beneath the clouds. Below him stood hundreds of trampled and bruised flowers. A display of anguish across every single one of their faces. At the front of the flowers stood the healthiest one, he must have the one who had the strength to throw the telescope up to me. It all made sense to him at that moment. They had sent the telescope to him in the bottle he dropped in order to have him realized what he had done. All this time while he was living the dream live of constantly being healthy and basking in the sun, these flowers were being trampled by him and trapped under the clouds where sunlight could not reach.
Angered at his actions he knew what he must do. He had so much extra water, and they needed it so dearly, so he reached up into his leaves and pulled out a great large water jug. He then wrung out the water from his branches into the jug, which he then dumped into the clouds. This caused it to rain all throughout the area and give the flowers the water they needed. Without the extra energy from the water he knew he could no longer walk as before, so he firmly planted himself in the ground and closed his eyes, never to open them again, for this was the best solution for both the flowers and himself. He is planted there sleeping above those flowers while it rains to this very day, as they sit there, forever grateful for what he has done.