Hello! My name is Kelly Lam, and I’m studying animation at Freestyle Academy. This past year has been my first and only year at Freestyle, and over the course of it I was able to vastly expand my technological repertoire by focusing my energy on learning new programs and skills, as well as expressing myself creatively in as many mediums as I possibly could.

These are a handful of works I’ve created over the course of my time at Freestyle which I feel most accurately represent who I am and what I have achieved.

Zenith Project

Our Zenith Project was the final, end of the year project for our elective class. I chose to create a short 2D animation centered on a queer love story with lots of cloud imagery throughout.

Because of my limited experience with 2D animation, I had to adapt and work hard on many parts of this project, but it was well worth the satisfaction of seeing it finally completed. I know I put all my effort into it, and I hope the final product shows it. I’ve always wanted to see more LGBTQ representation in the media, and so I think contributing my own art with meaningful representation is definitely a step in the right direction. I hope that Freestyle students, present and future, will be able to enjoy and perhaps relate to my Zenith in their own way, and I’m glad I got the chance to put a part of myself into animation.

Animated 3D Character

The following are some works I made in my animation elective class which feature my character Kinoko, who I modeled, sculpted, and painted in class through our learned applications.

This is a render of Kinoko made through Substance Painter. We were able to give our characters their own backstories and character motivations as we pleased. I wanted her to be a witch who wears a mushroom hat rather than a traditional witch hat.

These are all clips from different assignments in which we had to animate different actions for our characters, and I had a lot of fun learning how to do 3D animation with Kinoko. I feel like I was able to truly depict her personality and character through every movement and clip in this reel. My learning experiences in my elective class have truly been a joy, and without the help of my instructor none of these clips would have been nearly as satisfying to create.

Digital Art

In Digital Media, we had the chance to make various types of digital art using the programs Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. These are a couple of pieces which I feel the most proud of.

For my mandala, I originally just wanted to make something that had eyeballs in it, but in my artistic process I took inspiration from a variety of sources while creating the design. One that I thought was particularly interesting was the concept of biblically accurate angels, since (according to Google) in the book of Ezekiel, certain angels are described as being uncanny creatures consisting of many floating wheels and eyes, which was a concept I thought was cool. I also added some plants in the center because I wanted to use some leaf brushes that I found in the brush library, and during coloring I wanted to make the background look like varying colors of the sky during the day and at nightfall. Furthermore, I wanted to emulate the feeling of being watched, which is why I added a lot of eyes in unique places.

We could choose to paint whatever we wanted for our pastel painting project, and so I scrolled through my camera roll, picked my favorite frog picture which I had saved on my phone, and turned it into a painting. I have experience making digital paintings in the past, and so this project was very enjoyable for me. It was a very relaxing process and looking at the end result makes me happy.

For our photoshop compositing assignment, I started by combining a bunch of random unrelated ideas I had into a singular composition, which gradually got more and more chaotic, and by the end my scene looked apocalyptic and cryptic as hell. There’s no real message to my piece, but I think the fun of it is that it doesn’t make sense, and so viewers can interpret it in a million different ways. That’s also what I love about surrealism as a genre, that things can look as weird and meaningless as the artist wants. Most of the assets I used in this piece were just stock images I found on google, which I then mashed together to make weird creatures or a cursed city skyline.

I really enjoyed the creative freedom I had throughout this project, which I probably wouldn’t have had as much of in a realistic project, and I liked being able to just add more and more ideas to my piece until they amalgamated together into something horrific and awesome.