Introduction
Hello, my name’s Kyle Jhong, and welcome to my portfolio! At Freestyle Academy, I’m taking Digital Media and English classes with a focus on Animation. Through this program, I’ve learned lots of technical creative skills in industry-standard programs (PhotoShop, After Effects, Illustrator, Maya, etc) as well as how to express myself and make great work.
Below are three of the animation projects I’ve poured the most care into during my time at Freestyle.
Documentary
During our junior year, we were tasked to create documentary animations cut from interviews with friends or family. For this project, I interviewed my dad, Eugene Jhong. I transcribed the interview, shortened it to form a script, edited the audio recording, made storyboards, animated in PhotoShop, and finally added original music and sound effects.
I used Adobe PhotoShop to animate this, drawing with a pastel brush and animating on the timeline. Working on a tight timeline, I used a more simple style so I could focus on the color and motion, and it really paid off as I was able to finish just in time. I pushed myself to make every shot interesting, but not so cluttered that it distracted from my dad’s words. Overall this is the project I’m proudest of because it was incredibly ambitious and the message is meaningful to me.
I valued the insightful conversations I had with my dad throughout this project. He is a greatly intelligent, calm, and open-minded person, and picking up his little pieces of wisdom created a deeper bond between us.
3D Narrative Animation
In our Animation classes, we learned 2D animation for the first year and then explored 3D for the second. I have to say, the process of creating 3D models and animating them is more complicated than one would think—it took us 3 whole months to build our first models from start to finish. After we became comfortable, however, we were put into groups to create our own narrative animations.
Coordinating an ambitious project with a team and having it actually pay off is such an amazing feeling. Our team was sure we were doomed as we quickly became 2 weeks behind the schedule we had set for ourselves, but we turned it around with a lot of hard work. Overall, it was an amazing experience to tackle all the problems we overcame.
Zenith
Since the start of my time at Freestyle, I’ve heavily anticipated the “Zenith” project—the culmination of all our creative efforts. For the Zenith, students can create anything they choose, whether it be a film, animation, article, or song. Since I’m in animation, I decided to animate.
At the beginning of the quarantine I started working on a video game (titled “Jaded” on Steam) with my friend and it has quickly become my biggest passion project outside of school. One of the reasons I was so excited to learn animation at Freestyle was to create more fluid game animations. So I chose to create a cutscene—six animations to be played over the credits of the game—for my Zenith project.
I hold myself to a high standard when it comes to art for my game, and it was a huge risk for me to attempt to draw more realistically proportioned people for this project. I’ve always felt that I lack fundamental skills when it comes to drawing, and I wanted to push myself to try and draw people and backgrounds in perspective despite never having tried much before.
The credits sequence that I finished for this project still has stuff missing—there’s no sound and no words on screen yet. This is something my video game team wanted to figure out later in the development process—so below is just the raw animations. Later when we finish the game, we’re going to add creases and folds on the postcards/white borders, probably draw a graphic for the table below them and add shadows, add the credits, and add music and sound.
Animation Reel
And finally, here is a demo reel I’ve created with an assortment of my other projects in it. Thanks for checking all this out!