Introduction
For my Zenith project, I decided to create an animatic featuring the characters and story beats from my Worldbuilding project. Over the course of my time in Freestyle, I have taken many opportunities to expand on these characters and story, some of which I’ve been developing since 2019. So, I only found it fitting that my final project paid homage to them.
During the Narrative unit in my Junior year, I created the character Mandy, who would eventually become “Reagan”. During the Explorations project, I made a plush of one of the central characters, Cassidy. Finally, for the Worldbuilding project this year, I got the opportunity to properly dedicate time to fleshing out these characters and the world they inhabit.
I specifically chose to do this project because I knew it would challenge me. I’ve always struggled with perfectionism, which becomes very difficult to manage as an artist, but over these past four years, I have dedicated a lot of effort to overcoming this, and have made considerable progress.
There are 73 drawings in total in this project, which means I couldn’t waste too much time worrying about how perfect they looked. I worked on each sequence out of order, so you can see throughout the video as my drawings become more and less constricted.
I’m planning on going into 2D animation in college, and although I’m not very interested in pursuing a career as a storyboard artist, knowing how to compose shots, and create dynamic poses and expressions are all valuable skills. That said, after completing this project, I’ve noticed the pace at which I work has increased by a marginal amount.
I’m not usually a fast worker, but that’s why I wanted to push myself to complete this project. This also gave me an opportunity to practice drawing environments as someone who is primarily a character artist.
Process
I have done *very* rough storyboards for past animation projects, but those were not nearly as coherent or refined. I’ve tried tackling projects like this in the past, but found them far too intimidating, which is another reason why I chose to do this for my zenith project.
I have fewer progress images than I would like to, as all my early work is buried under layers upon layers in giant Photoshop files, but this should give you a rough idea of the progression of my project. You can see some boards that didn’t make it into the final version for various reasons (timing didn’t work, I didn’t like them, they didn’t fit the scene, I was tired and I didn’t want to draw them).
I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to do for my Zenith project since I had seen the seniors present theirs my junior year. I knew I wanted to create something like an animatic/animation with these characters, but my idea didn’t become solidified until after we concluded the Worldbuilding unit.
Completed Project
Reflection
Zenith Celebration