The zenith project is the final project at Freestyle Academy, where seniors take all the skills they learned throughout Digital Media and their elective classes to combine into one final project.
My zenith project is turning film into animation. This particular project is a passion for me as I have always wanted to study the composition of a film scene through animation every frame of the scene. The content I envision will utilize multimedia artwork for the background (traditional art) and the main characters of the scene will be animated digitally on Adobe Photoshop.
This Zenith project is a new challenge for me as I will be using hand drawn animation to draw the opening scene of Andrzej zulawski’s “On the silver Globe”. Specifically, I have to find the perfect frame rate to not ensure that I’m overworking by drawing too many frames, nor too less frames which would make the animation very choppy. In addition, I’m planning to broaden my quality of animation, specifically with making my lines more realistic and more fluid.
In this project, I incorporated my skills in Adobe Photoshop that I learned in animation to create different layers for the background and character animations, as well as incorporating key concepts of animation like walk and run cycles.
This is a shot of my workspace for the project, where I drew on top of the exported video frame layers using photoshop layers.
Final product
Reflection
I chose the idea for my zenith after watching animated shorts made by Gobelins animation students and wanting to replicate their quality of animation. I was impressed by how they were able to preserve natural human movement into their works, and wanted to incorporate it into my own animation. To do so, I decided to rotoscope a scene from Andrzej zulawski’s “On the Silver Globe”, frame by frame. At first, I researched different animation techniques so that I could rotoscope the most effectively. One of these techniques was figuring out which colors were the most prominent throughout every frame, and filling out that color early on in the process. In addition, I also studied how Hayao Miyazaki shaded characters in his animations, which helped a lot when I was getting started.
Moreover, the 21st century skill which I improved the most was technological literacy and self direction. This was because rotoscoping was new to me, and when I was starting out I didn’t realize how many frames or how many frames per second I should make the scene. As a result, I was working too hard. To improve, I looked through the movie and found another easier scene where the horse rider from the film is going down some snowy hills. This scene was fast paced, which meant that it could be animated at a lower framerate.
Additionally, the 21st century skills which I improved the least in this project would be teaming and collaboration. This was because I worked on this entire project by myself, but halfway into the project I realized that my other classmates were also rotoscoping a video, which meant I could’ve asked them for advice. Also, I wasn’t highly productive on my project as I was too obsessed over details versus the actual animation. For example, in the beginning of the project I wanted to do 8 different shades for the horse rider, but then I realized that I had to animate around 30-40 frames, and drawing 8 colors over and over again was going to be really time consuming.
In terms of how accomplished I felt with this project, I felt like I could’ve done more in order to ignite my passion for animation. This was primarily due to other responsibilities I had as a pianist, and I didn’t get enough time to animate. If I could start this project over, I definitely would’ve started from around February or January just to get some more frames in, and aim to animate a total of 200-300 frames (about 1 minute of animation). I would’ve also planned out the specific scenes from “On the Silver Globe” that I was going to animate, not just randomly pick the opening scene which is probably the most boring sequence. Throughout the film, there are actually interesting scenes like where the main character is taken on a beach and surrounded by alien soldiers.
Overall, the point of this project was to capture the beauty of cinematography as well as simplicity. I wanted to be able to capture a reflection on a horse’s fur, or move the perspective of the viewer with just a few objects. In the future, I hope to continue making rotoscope animation as well as traditional animation, and this Zenith project will definitely keep me motivated.