This website is dedicated to showing my work over the past couple months. My story started out as a flash fiction and evolved into an animatic and finally an animation. On this site you will see my story in each peice of the project. During this project I learned how to create an animation using Animate.
For our design project we took our flash fiction and turned it into a comic. We used Illustrator to recreate the comic that was orignally created as a poster.
My comic, Banjo the Snow Crow was inspired from my flash fiction written in English class. The idea originally came from a brainstorming activity and expanded into the foundation for my project. The comic tells the story of a scarecrow with a snowman’s head who struggles to scare away one last crow. In order to turn my idea from a flash fiction into a comic I had to identify the main ideas in my piece. I picked the six most important parts of the story to turn into my comic. To do this I used several tools including Illustrator to trace over my hand drawn comic. I used techniques such as the grid method to transfer my comic from my notepad to a full drawing and finally into the digital comic. The biggest struggle I encountered while creating this piece was making sure each item was on its own layer. This made it much easier to go back and make edits when done correctly.
Creating my comic was great for expanding my skills in Illustrator. Prior to this project I did not have a lot of experience using Illustrator.
Creating my story was the beginning to the long process of creating my animation. I brain stormed ideas and Banjo the Snowcrow was born.
The sun rose across the empty corn field. Banjo began to prepare for his long day of scaring the pesky noisy crows away from a nearby fence. The crisp breeze brushed against his snow covered head while his flannel red shirt kept the rest of his straw body warm. As the early morning turned to midday the three bothersome crows returned to their favorite worn out fence, just a couple feet away from where Banjo stood tall. The day was turning out to be any old autumn day. The three crows had just touched down on the old fence when they began their loud obnoxious crows that spread throughout the entire field. Banjo raised his weak straw arms and let out a cry to try and scare the crows away. One at a time the crows left the fence. However on this particular day one crow didn’t want to leave. Banjo did not know how to react. For years the same three crows would come to the fence and for years he would scare all three of them away. He could not figure out why the one crow wouldn’t leave. He tried once more as he raised his arms and let out a loud cry but once again the crow wouldn’t budge. The crow stayed set on the fence crowing away. The day went on and Banjo continued to try and scare the single crow away. He had never struggled his much to scare away a crow. As the hours passed he wished he knew what the crow wanted so that he would leave. Nightfall came and Banjo was out of ideas. He had tried everything possible to get the crow to stop crowing and leave. With little sunlight left Banjo tried one last idea. He grabbed a pumpkin from the nearby patch and put it in front of the crow. For the first time all day the crow did not crow loudly. The crow slowly walked towards the pumpkin and examined it from all sides. After minutes of careful examination the crow flew up onto the arm of Banjo and sat there quietly. Banjo did not know what he had done, but the crow was no longer crowing. To Banjo, that was all that mattered.
to view my Graphic Novel
The Graphic Novel was very important for creating the animatic and animation. I used the panels on the Graphic Novel as scenes for the animatic and ultimately the animation.
An animatic is a rough draft of a animation. It gives an idea of what is going to happen without actually animating anything but includes audio.
During this unit I learned how to create a Graphic Novel in English class. After creating the Graphic Novel we took all of the panels from the Graphic Novel and used them as scenes for an animatic. During this time we learned what makes a good animatic and how to use Adobe Animate. We also used Photoshop for creating each indiviual scene.
For our animation we took the story from our flash fiction and animatic and used Adobe Animate to creat our animation. We included sounds and used different tools that we learned in class.
Creating this animation I learned how to use Adobe Animate to create an animation.