The goal for the Narrative unit was to increase our capacities as story tellers, through writing, visuals, and audios. Our focus question for this unit was “How well can you visually tell a structured story?”. Using descriptive story telling, digital art, storyboards, and animations, we would communicate character and story arcs. We also deepened out technical knowledge and communication skills as we learned how to use Wacom Digital Drawing Pads, down shooters, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Avid Pro Tools, and Dragon Frame.
I think what I valued this most from this unit was how it really pushed me to try things that were generally not in my comfort zone. From increasing the length of animations or having to present my story to other people, there were a lot of new challenges that didn’t necessarily follow what I originally felt very confident doing. There was a lot of “no way forward, but through” that I had to do, but I think that ended up being very helpful. It taught me that I could do hard or uncomfortable things so long as I believed that I could complete them.
One of our assignments in English was to write a short story. This was probably one of the most difficult units for me. I wanted to do something that was vaguely inspired by Alice in Wonderland and the style of more old British classics. I had a very clear visual image in my head when I originally started writing, but I did have some struggles with writing the actually thing. I am mostly pleased with how it turned out, but there are still several things that I would go back and edit.
For the audio of the story, I recorded myself reading it and then edited out the repeating sentences, awkward pauses. Once I got the recording, I put it into ProTools which we had recently learned how to use. I used SFX audios to add background music and noises to prevent it from it being just me reading the story, and overall I think the audio reading turned out pretty pretty well.
I think what I valued about this project was the continued use of ProTools and working through writers block. There were a lot of frustrations that came with this project and I am not completely happy with how it turned out, but I did prove to myself that I could push through difficult things and get it done. It was also a good reminder for me to be more concise in my writing.
During this unit, we learned how to use Illustrator. There was a lot of different tools that we had to learn, but once we did, lots of different types of things began to become a lot easier. Illustrator provides a whole lot of helpful things like using the pen tools and being able to shift lines, paths, and other details to a point of specificity that Photoshop can’t really do. The vector images were also really helpful, especially because I did have to often change image size on various things and Illustrator made that transition much easier without losing any of the quality. All of the section banners for this page were made with Illustrator.
For our main project, we got the choice of project that involved Illustrator. I chose to do clothing art because I already had an idea for what I wanted to do. I am a major nerd and really enjoy a lot of stuff, but I don’t really get a lot of t-shirts or anything that are related to book series/movies/tv-shows that I like because I generally don’t like to spend my money on things that act as a neon beacon the fact that I am a nerd. When a change for me to design something more to my tastes, I took it and created a Lord of the Rings Sweatshirt. From a glance, it looks like a College sweatshirt, but the title “Second Breakfast Club” is a reference to one of my favorite lines in the movie. The logo in the center is the inside of Bilbo’s hobbit door, and the “Date Founded” is the date that the line would have been said canonically. I had never used a heat press, so there are some mistakes that were made in cutting out the stuff in stuff, but I am generally happy with how it turned out.
This was our last stop motion project of the year. We had to digitally design characters, then create a physical puppet that we would use to create a walk cycle. We would then create a digital character for the walk cycle. This project was a fun one, even if I really didn’t know what I was doing at first. There was a fair amount of trial and error to figure out to mold the clay and create puppets, but it was interesting to try and work around creating clothing that you had to figure how to put on when you couldn’t slide sleeves or pants over the feet or hands like you would with a human. This was also the first time that we drew directly into photoshop to animate. There was some learning to be done, especially about whether you would use a video layer or frame animation, but it was definitely very helpful background for when we did the full length narrative animation.
The lip sync animation was a project where we were tasked with finding an audio and having our animated character’s mouth move with the words. I chose a audio clip from Arrested Development that I found when I was surfing the web. I cracked up when I first heard it, and decided that to use it. This project was really fun, despite being short. Unfortunately, my family had suffer through me constantly quoting it, because after listening to the same thing over and over again as you match up the mouth movement, it gets stuck in your head. This was also a really helpful revisit of After Effects and how I really should have been using it rather than what I had done for the Puppet Project, because I was later able to apply this to the visual narrative animation. I am pretty happy with the results, though I do wish that I had spent a little bit more time on drawing the actual face and that kind of thing because it ended up being a little rushed.
For our visual narrative project, we were put into groups of four to create an animation that was at least 90 seconds long and told some kind of story. My group consisted of Alice, Lucy, and Lindsey, and nothing in this project could have been done without them. We had a very open-ended prompt with very little direction for what type of story that we had to create, so we ended up landing on a story about a witch who is attempting to summon love as it approaches Valentine’s Day, but keeps failing. We decided to divide the work up where each person would do the animation for a specific “day” and then we would all work together on the final day (Alice – Day 1; Lindsey – Day 2; Me – Day 3; Lucy – Day 4).
This was one of the hardest projects yet because not only was I still pretty new to drawing and animating on Photoshop, it was also the biggest project I had ever been part of. The most frames I had created in any previous animation was around 120 (my object animation), so the jump from that to drawing out nearly a minute of animation was a big one. Our group quickly figured out that if we had any overlapping scenes, we should just have one person draw or animate it, and then recycle it whenever we needed it to save time. The audio for the animation was also a lot more difficult than I was expecting. I hadn’t done a whole lot of work with SFX audios so that was a large learning curve. Finding background music was also an adventure, though I learned a lot of helpful tricks through trial and error. After Effects was also a new program, but after spending so much time doing all of the editing on it, I think that I have gotten a lot better at using it.
This project taught me a lot and I feel like I have learned even more about expediting the animation process. I figured out a lot of new tricks that I am definitely going to be taking advantage of for future projects. There was a fair bit of bumping around in the dark, especially in the beginning, but I am really happy with the results. I think that some of the experimentation and the slow figuring out of what worked and what didn’t were ultimately worth it.