Introduction
[How well can you visually tell a structured story?]
In this unit, we focused on applying our knowledge on visual storytelling to create a unique narrative. (What I valued from the project in all classes and how I improved as a storyteller and digital artist (visual and audio)).
Story
In English, we had to write a short story (under a thousand words). In the beginning, everything was about adapting and building a character the story would be centered around, but I didn’t really follow it.
My inspiration for the story was the short works of Edgar Allan Poe. That’s a lie, I actually just took a look at those two sentence horror stories on Reddit.
I wasn’t very happy with the cover art (we had to make it in illustrator); it just wasn’t the feeling I was going for, so I redrew it.
We worked in Pro Tools to add sound effects to our audio stories in order to make them sound a little more like podcasts. We cut and cleaned up our audio, and added SFX later to ‘immerse’ the listener more in our story.
I really liked this project! The hardest part was setting up our recordings in Pro Tools (since we recorded on microphones in isolation booths and had to sync up our projects), and after that it was mostly just choosing which sounds should play where in the recording.
Illustrator Project
(Below is the design I made for a mousepad.)
My inspiration for the project is all of the visual effects in Into the Spiderverse. I saw all the comic-esque bubbles that would appear on screen, and had the idea to make something like that for my project. Aside from just learning more about Illustrator, I confirmed my suspicion that I am not interested enough in Illustrator to go into any branch of graphic design when I enter the workforce.
One of my biggest problems with this project is the fact that I just suck at Illustrator. As someone who has only ever worked in pixel softwares like Photoshop, I really struggle with vector-based programs. About what I confirmed, I confirmed that I am not fit for all the small, technical details like making sure lines match up / fit together in Illustrator. I also confirmed that I want to continue using Photoshop.
I was actually really proud of the colours I chose. I had a really hard time choosing them, because I’m not a very… colourful person. But in the end, I think it fits well, especially because I wanted bright colours that had the style of Into the Spider Verse or comic books.
I’ll definitely use Illustrator again. Even if I complained about it before, I think it’s a really useful tool that is incredibly powerful, especially for making and editing text. I enjoy making posters in my free time, so this new knowledge of Illustrator will really help.
At the start of the project, Mr Flo showed us what Illustrator art could look like, and my first thought was “Oh, I could do that” because I can draw. But I figured out really quickly that it was a whole new learning curve, and not something that I was used to. Looking back on those pieces that he showed, I really don’t know how someone could be so good at Illustrator, and using it to create images.
Walk Cycles
At the start of the unit, we made puppets out of different materials and made a walk cycle with them. And, as our first digital assignment of the year, we also animated a walk cycle in Adobe Photoshop to learn the basics. After we had both videos, we put them together in After Effects.
I had a great time making our puppets… as you can imagine, mine was a lot of fun. I wanted to make it walk on all fours, but it wouldn’t be able to balance like that (so now when it walks on its hind legs, it looks very, very wrong). For the digital version, I, like most of my classmates, had not used Photoshop before. But I think we all learned it pretty quickly, thanks to Mr. Cho’s quick lesson on how to set up the timeline and add keyframes.
Lip Sync
Our next assignment was to learn how to animate with audio. We got to choose a ten second segment of any copyright-free audio we wanted and animate a character speaking to it using stickers on top of a base (like having different mouth shapes and putting them on top of a character whenever a sound comes up).
I kinda ran out of time for this one… hence the png. But aside from that, I’m super happy with it! It was my first time syncing animation up with audio, and it was a really fun project.
I used some characters, Remmy and Khalon, a couple buddies in a story I wrote. You might’ve heard the audio before on TikTok, and I just wanted to recreate it.
Narrative
For our narrative final, we were randomly assigned teams of three people, and told to make an animated short of about forty seconds.
There are many ways that teams can divide their work, but we decided to assign different parts to different members in their entirety (backgrounds, animation, colour, etc). I was in charge of the middle section and the credits.
We had a couple months to work on this, and my amazing team got six times the length we needed to make our film! I think we were all super surprised at how much our project exceeded our expectations (they did mine, at least).
Our story revolves around a boy who is robbing the tomb of a dead (monster? Man?), who he discovers is not actually dead, and wants his stuff back.
Looking back on it, I know I could have done a lot better on my parts. I animated all of the parkour scenes, and it was my first time making a chase scene, or anything that had to do with a lot of movement. I had also never made a scene that was based entirely off telling a story, which I feel like my part lacks.
Overall, though, I’m proud of how it turned out! Now I know what to do for the next time to make it better.