Introduction
The zenith project is the largest and final project that we have at Freestyle. We are given one month and complete creative freedom over any topic within our chosen Freestyle elective to make something that shows the result of our skills from our time at this school. For this project I also wanted to team up with my good friend, Maya Sullivan, to create an original 2D animation.
For our project, we made a 10 second character trailer for an original character of mine that showed off her multiple abilities. The finished result is centered around Sashi, a short person with crab-like powers & fire breathe.
I had always been very passionate of 2D animation, but I had never gotten the chance to learn how to animate in 2D since I had only attended Freestyle for my senior year. It was a big challenge for me since I was experimenting with a whole new software of animating with such limited time to get it right. Maya was tasked with trying to teacher me how to animate in Photoshop which was initially sort of frustrating but I soon became a little more used to it.
End Result
The Process
Animation Process
After Maya had drawn up the storyboards, I took the pictures into Photoshop to plan out the timing of our animation. Then, we began doing rough animation which was mostly done by Maya as she was teaching me the steps to animate on Photoshop. After the roughs were finished, then came the line art. This step was more natural for me to do since the panning of the movement was already finished. I did most of the line art and tweaked certain poses to convey the actions more clearly. Then, after I finalized the colors of the character we started coloring it in. The process was made much easier when I learned a trick to color more efficiently from Anna Majorek. The most difficult part of the coloring process was doing the claw transformation sequence. I used a clip of Garnet from Steven Universe activating her gauntlets as reference and had to watch the video frame by frame to understand how the effect of her gauntlets glowing while being activated was achieved. Then, we designed the backgrounds for each shot & edited it all together in After Effects.
Zenith Presentation
Reflection
Since I was young, I’ve always had a fascination with 2D animation so I took this project as the perfect opportunity to explore that medium since I never got a chance to study it before because I am a first year senior. It felt like a big risk to be experimenting with a process I was unfamiliar with on such a big project with such little time to finish it. I’m grateful that my partner, Maya Sullivan, was consistently supportive and helpful when it came to teaching me how to do everything. What made things even more difficult though was the fact that not only did I have no prior knowledge of how to animate using Photoshop, but I also wasn’t even very familiar with the Photoshop’s interface because the majority of my digital art is done using Krita. From past experiences I’ve learned that Maya isn’t exactly the best at giving clear instructions while teaching so I was a little sceptical about how useful I’d be during this project. But because of Maya’s teaching, we were actually able to stay on top of all of our deadlines. However, since I still was pretty shaky on the animating process, we decided to split the workload to be more efficient by having Maya do most of the rough animation while I stick to my biggest artistic strengths, which were line art & coloring. We then slowed down by the fact that since I am in AM Freestyle and Maya is in PM we can’t collaborate on at the same time in class. This made communication a little harder but we managed by consistently checking in on the other one’s progress and keeping in close contact through texting. To make things faster, we decided to animate a character that I had already designed and had already created, named Sashi. We were inspired by the character trailers that characters are given in video games and we wanted to make a short, 15 second character trailer. I’ve been developing this character for almost a year so I am familiar with the ways she moves & fights. I created a YouTube playlist of clips from different cartoons to use as animation reference for myself and Maya that showed movements similar to Sashi’s fighting style. If I were to do this project over, I would spend more time cleaning up the line art and adding detail to the background. There are a lot of little details in our end result that I wish I could have a tiny bit more time to fix. While I can still see a few awkwardly posed frames and the sometimes jagged line art, I know that those are just minor details that most people don’t care about. Overall, I am actually really proud of myself and Maya for making this. I feel like I’ve improved my artistic skills and knowledge a lot all because of this project.