Explorations

Introduction

At Freestyle Academy, the Explorations Unit allows Juniors to be able to choose a passion to explore and expand while improving on a particular skill set regarded as “21st Century Skills” (i.e. visual literacy, risk taking, self direction, etc.) Film students were instructed to explore a film-related passion or interest in which they did not have any experience, ranging from screenwriting, special effects, film noir, and more.

For my explorations project, I decided to learn how to animate a dance video using After Effects. I intended on expanding the 21st Century skills of self direction as well as creativity, as I would complete the project individually and create creative animations.

Process

I broke my project into three main steps to make it easier for me to organize and plan out how much time I would spend on each step. These steps consisted of choreographing, filming, and animating.

1. Choreographing

The first step to my project was to choreograph a dance. I spent about a week choreographing a 30 second hip hop piece in my garage, and filmed myself with my phone throughout the process to see how it looked and improve it.

2. Filming

The second step was recording the dance on camera. I set up two lights in my garage at 45 degree angles to where I was facing in order to create shadows and depth to my plain background. I spent two nights filming until I was satisfied with a take and made sure I was in focus for its entirety.

3. Animating

The third and most tedious step was to animate. I spent a total of more than 15 hours animating frame by frame in Adobe After Effects, then overlaid glowing effects on the brush strokes.

Infographic

After learning how to create infographics and other posters in Digital Media using Adobe Illustrator, I made my own infographic highlighting the three steps to my project.

Click on this preview to see the full sized image

Final Production

Overall, I found this project very rewarding. Starting from an idea all the way to producing a video independently taught me how important collaboration is in film, because I experienced a lot of struggles by simply not having anyone to work with. I also gained a much greater appreciation for animation artists and I’m glad to have learned a new skill I can apply in the future.

Presentation

In English class during this unit, our task was to create a presentation highlighting our work and research that went into our individual projects. We then recorded our presentations (which would have been otherwise presented in real life) for our classmates to enjoy.