Introduction and Reflection
There are people all around us doing extraordinary things every day. For this project, our goal was to capture the life of a person and translate that to the medium of a written and formatted article and an elective project, mine being animation. We learned how to be journalists and artists, how to accurately tell a story of a real life person in a compelling way and how to make their story into a visual piece of art. I think the most useful skill I picked up from this project was how to take what a person has said and paraphrase it. There were times that I had information from my subject that I needed to shorten in length for the article, and I got to practice that a lot as I was drafting it.
We began drafting the article in English as soon as we had our first interview transcript. Our goal was to combine a relevant and researchable topic and information about the subject through the interview to create an article on them. I chose game development as my topic, because Kyle is a game developer and I wanted to learn more about what he does.
(click on the gem to see the article)
Animation Production
To start off the project, I made designs for avatars that would represent Kyle(my subject) and Connor(his friend) based off of the ones they used in their devlog YouTube videos. I then made sprites for all of the enemies that I would implement. I put several of them in a T-pose so that I could create a “rig” for them so that they could be easily animated.
Next, I created backgrounds based on places from the games, and also one that was more of a living room setting (not in the game) for Kyle to be sitting in. The backgrounds were more inspired by the themes of the levels than how they actually looked though. I was trying to replicate the foothills and beach levels. At this point, I had made a lot of full-color scenes, so I decided to do some simpler drawings of the characters and use those parts for visuals helping support the information that was being conveyed by the audio.
Finally, I put it all together. For the living room I had multiple spots I wanted to focus on, so I used the camera tool in my animation software(OpenToonz) to move around the room. I used the plastic tool, skeleton tool, or in-betweening to move the characters. I used a variety of methods to experiment on how it would look with movement.
The most enjoyable part of this production was probably making the idle animations, such as Kyle’s avatar sitting on the chair holding the game controller. I think this project helped me improve on backgrounds, even though they were fairly simple I think they served their purposes well and conveyed the atmosphere of the scene. One aspect I would improve on my project is the way I used the different characters, I feel like at the end I mostly haphazardly placed different characters in scenes without much thought of what role they played within it. Despite some issues, I am pleased with the way this turned out.
Subject Biography
Kyle Jhong is a high school student who develops games with his friend Connor Sun. They use the coding platform Unity to make his games. He has been interested in video games and making games since he was a kid, especially in terms of finding the secrets and exploring everything they have to offer. He hopes that people who play his games will feel the same way he did playing those games as a young child.