Introduction
The Visual Narrative was one unit that really inspired me to use the creative mind that I sometimes possess. In this unit, we were given the opportunity to make whatever we wished and it really inspired me to make better animations and amazing stories that I wouldn’t have had any clue how to make. But thanks to Freestyle, I do!
Story
An assignment we had to make in English class was to make our own story! It had to be 500-1000 words which sounds like a lot but I actually wish I had more words because I LOVED making this story, I got to make a story I had in my mind for years and actually start to write it. I decided to make this story about a character I made up years and years ago named Gyro, he is made out of Bionicle parts which are a very challenging version of Lego. I love making custom figures which is what Gyro is and I made a whole entire backstory for him and I actually got to bring it to life!
“The date is 4012, August 15th. The Bot, a company that was founded by the world’s greatest engineers in order to make a life for humans easier, was struggling. All the machines they produced were designed to help with chores, do construction work, take care of the elderly, and more. However, since crime has been way up in recent years, the company was scrambling to meet the demand for a machine to serve and protect civilization, instead of it just helping you take out the trash.
Nicolaus always had a creased lab coat, frizzled hair even if he combed it. He was always seen wearing a labcoat and a pair of goggles over his head. His hair was a faded shade of blond and had piercing blue eyes. Nicolaus loved to tinker and make weird and interesting gadgets, bots, and weapons. But this project made him want to pull his hair out. He spent months just coming up with the design-it was more cartoony than he imagined it to be, but it didn’t matter. It had bright colors all around, one antenna longer than the other, a huge gauntlet for a hand, while the other is normal size, and a flat face with a block on the back of it to hold its brain circuit. The face was a round blue disk with gold plating on the back of it. He designed the armor to be bullet and laser proof, his torso being a bright shiny gold, but also a bit small. It had long arms for close 1-1 combat and long legs to run quickly and jump up as tall as a 10 story building. Its 2 main abilities were a rocket fist on his left gauntleted hand, and a huge sonic laser beam that shot through the machine’s disk like face. Even though this project was making Nicolaus more crazy then he already was, he grew attached to his design, especially the face. It looked very similar to a gyrosphere that was flattened. Then he found a name for his machine. Project Gyro.432
Years passed and the more he worked on his creation, the more he became obsessed with it. Indeed, this was becoming more his project than the company’s. Nicolaus hasn’t slept much, his fatigue is beyond low, and the more he works, the more tired he gets. Nicolas might only be in his 30s, but it seems like he has the energy of a 90 year old man at this point, who is struggling to stay alive. Niicolaus asked his boss for months to give him the materials in order to make it. He needed the finest steel, at least 10 ounces of gold, and finally the most advanced motherboards and CPUs the company had. His boss wouldn’t let him have it though, his boss argued that it was way to risky and expensive to give him those, so he had to make it from something else. Nicolaus however didn’t like that answer, so he snuck into the storage rooms and smuggled the materials he needed. It took a few days to go back and forth without getting caught, but he managed. One he got all the parts he spent day and night soldering, smelting, merging, programming, testing, and praying that his machine would work.
Finally, everything was all put together and ready. It was finally time to activate his creation. He set Project Gyro.432 into place then hooked everything up to activate the machine. He pulled down gently on the switch to give power to the machine. Nothing. He tried again, this time pulling harder on the switch, and electricity jolted all around his creation, but the machine was still vacant. He pulled on the switch with such force that he broke the handle off. Light and electricity flew all across the room and broke all the surrounding walls and shattered the windows. Once the smoke cleared, Nicolas got a view of the damaged room where his creation was set. Project Gyro.432 was on the floor, unresponsive. Their gold plating charred to a brownish color, scraps of broken metallic steel all around it, and the gyrosphere face is as dark as the night.
All he could feel was heartbreak, the dam was having trouble holding back all the water Nicolas was about to release. He slowly walked to the burnt piece of scrap and used all of his strength to pick it up and throw it across the room, seeing it slide across the charred floor. Just as he was about to leave, mad and heartbroken, he heard a voice from behind: “OW!” Nicolas turned to see Gyro.432 sitting up looking straight at him with his illuminated blue spherical face. “Who are you? Where am I? What am I?”. Nicolas couldn’t speak. His mind was racing and he finally managed to speak the words, “I am Nicolas, your creator. Welcome to the world!” Gyro.432 was using his new strength to move, his components in his legs making sounds of a slight hum as he stood up as scrap scrapes off his body. This was weird Nicolas thought, he didn’t program his creation to speak when it came alive, nor ask questions. There was only one explanation: Gyro.432 was sentient! Nicolas still couldn’t believe his machine was working and operational! He decided to call him Gyro for short. Nicolas stood right next to Gyro, who was roughly 9ft tall, and gave him the world’s softest, gentle hug as he wrapped his arms around gyro’s torso in a quick but calm motion. Gyro did not know what this was since he just came to life 5 minutes ago. He then randomly thought of a thing to do, he hugged him back, it felt weird to him, it felt like he was squeezing a sponge since Nicolas was soft and squishy compared to him. Minutes pass and the two finally let go of each other.”
Illustrations
One of our next projects was to create what’s called an Exquisite Corpses design. Basically, 3 or 4 people have a layout on paper or in Illustrator, then there are 3 or 4 split sections of the paper. Each split section has what we call markers which are where our starting points are. Then one person has to draw in their selected square. Once you are done with yours and everyone else is done. You connect them all together based on the order you went in and the lines you connect them to. I was paired with two friends of mine named LemoS and MayaC. Lemo did the left side, I did the middle, and Maya did the right square. But you probably didn’t understand what I said since I most likely didn’t explain it that well, just go ahead and look at the drawing and you’ll see what I mean.
Our next Illustrator project was a fun one, we got to make whatever we wanted and turn it into whatever piece of “merchandise” we wanted! We were given a bunch of choices, one was a hoodie, a puzzle, a mug, and much more! I decided to make a mousepad. Reason 1 is my old mouse pad is getting, you guessed it, old. The Second reason is I’ve been wanting to get a new mousepad anyway and getting the option to create my own! I had to take that opportunity, here is the art on the top and the finished product on the bottom!
Music
Our next step was to create a parody song using Pro Tools! This was really fun since we had the option to work with a partner and I chose to work with my good friend ZoeP. She and I just sat down in class together and we were thinking of a song we could voice over. Then I thought of the perfect song which she super agreed on, and that was “Hakuna Matata” from The Lion King! Lucky for us there was a version of the song with no lyrics so we didn’t have to do too much editing. Then came the hard part and thinking up new lyrics. I and her final thought of an ‘in my opinion’ very funny idea to replace Hakuna Matata with Vegetarians. I’ll let the song speak for itself.
Animation
The animation unit has got to be the most fun I’ve had in a very long time! We got to create so many amazing pieces of animation and I can’t wait to share them with you.
Walk Cycle
This was one of my favorite projects for animation this year because we got to create our own puppets! What we did was we had to draw a design that we wanted to turn into a puppet. We were expected to make the puppets, create a stop-motion walk cycle, then move on to Photoshop and create a digital walk cycle. For my puppet, I wanted to create a gender-bent version of my RecRoom avatar, in the game I am dressed up as a farmer and I thought it would be fun to make a female version of my character in the game and actually give it arms and legs. I named her Carley since that seemed to fit. I ended up using her to create a lot of stop-motions animations you’ll see later on.
The first step to creating the puppet was wire armature. We had to create an outline of the character on a printed-out sheet of paper and then measure it with the aluminum wire we were given. Once we got the basic shape of the character we were given polymer clay to make the head, hands were optional to make with clay. Then we had to take some chopsticks, break them into certain pieces and tape them onto the arms and legs of the puppet to make joints. The next step was to heat up some thermal plastic beads in order to kind of glue the and keep the wire armature in place. Then it was all up to me to create the shape of the puppet. I decided to have the main body be made out of tinfoil and to wrap it all in tape after.
Then it was time to start sewing! I have never sewed before so I had to learn myself; it was surprisingly easy to get the hang of. The first thing I did was paint the head and draw on the face, then I wrapped the arms and legs with an elastic bandage because it looked like tan skin color. Once I got the cloth I needed, I had to first make the checker pattern shirt, then I made the top part of the overalls. Then I made the bottom legs and sewed them together! Next, I painted the hands and feet, and I took some red yarn and glued them to the head. For the glasses I actually used aluminum wire and bend it to shape, it took me a few tries but I got a pair I liked. Finally, I made the hat out of clay and drew a red outline around it. I had a lot of fun making this puppet!
Now it was time to bring Carley to life. We used a software called DragonFrame to stop motion and animate this puppet. We had a wooden board and we had nuts actually inside of the feat, and for the bolts, we put them underneath the board and twisted the bolt into the nut in the feat. We had to do that for two steps, that way we could loop it to create our big project which was a walk cycle.
Now that she was done being animated, it was time to move on to a digital walk. We went into Photoshop what I did was I took my character from my bio and cut up pieces of the drawings and moved them into specific places and turned it into a frame animation. I STRUGGLED with this project since I was clueless about digital animation before and had no idea what I was doing. The finished animation is now even two steps, it’s just one but if you speed it up it looks like it’s two. Looking back on this project I can definitely do better now which is a good thing.
Then for the final project, we had to make an animation combining our two walk cycles so they would walk past each other. We had to do this in After Effects and I can confidently say that I am now an expert in After Effects, you’ll know more later. I chose a farm background for obvious reasons, I didn’t include music however because…I don’t know why but it looks good nonetheless!
Lip Sync
Our next project was a digital lip-sync of whatever we wanted! This was such a fun project to do because I really like the process of it all, which I will tell you about. The first step was choosing a character, I decided to do Bendy from “Bendy and the Ink Machine” because I thought it would be fun to animate his mouth moving since he is a cartoon. I wanted to have him sing a song so I went through youtube and found a Bendy song I really liked. Then We went into Photoshop and the first thing I did was the background, then I made the head and body. I then had to create a bunch of different mouth shapes so I could animate the words correctly. Next, we went into After Effects and this is when I really started to understand how to use the software! We had to export all of our drawing files and put them into After Effects. Then we had to export the song and the most tedious process for most would be listening to the audio bit by bit and placing each mouth in the blackhead to make it look like the mouth was moving. At first, it looked choppy but then I got the hang of it and you can really see that towards the end. Remember how I said I loved this project? Well, I loved it so much that I made a second one! It was actually much longer than my first one, not as much movement but the mouth movements are really smooth. I’ll let the videos speak for themselves.
Visual Narrative Animation
This was our final project and it was our first group project. Basically, there would be one person who would be the team leader and 3 others. The main task was that we had to create a 1-minute animation, I was the team leader for this project (Yay!). After some ideas and a whole drawing session, I and my team decided to make a stop-motion/digital animation about 2 kids who are from a stop-motion world, and when they’re walking through the woods they spot a digitally animated bird that looks weird to them. When they follow it they find a portal and when they go through it they get transported to a digital world. In that world, there is a lighthouse keeper and he is alone in his tower. When he spots the kids he runs out to go get them since the portal dropped them in the ocean. When he gets the kids he is a little confused and freaked out because these kids look strange to them. He brings them to his lighthouse and the kids end up staying with him because they love being with the lighthouse keeper. After a while, they see the bird that brought them to their new home. They see the bird fly through another portal but they look at each other and both agree with a single stare that they’d rather be right there in their new home with the lighthouse keeper
This project took a long time to make and we almost didn’t submit it on time, since someone in our group was too busy watching anime lol. It doesn’t matter though because it turned out really well and my team has the title of the first stop-motion animated Narrative film!
If we had more time to make this I would most likely spend more time helping make a certain scene and make the stop-motion character move smoother since I was in a rush for some parts.
There were so many files for this project, it was insane. Don’t ask how I managed to keep track of where the files are located because I don’t even know.