The Reason
This entire year has been dedicated to learning the fundamentals. From small flip books to entire character walk cycle composites, we’ve done it all. However, I always felt that something was missing. Even though we were given complete creative freedom over what we wanted to do, there were always themes that we were restricted by. However, for this Explorations Project, we could do anything. This was when I decided to make something that I had been holding back on for the whole year: A cool dynamic digital animation.
I had always been inspired by shows like Naruto, One Punch Man, and Mob psycho for their dynamic character movements. For this project I wanted to make something similar.
Photoshop: The Animating
I chose to animate my entire animation on photoshop. This was because it was the program we were initially introduced to for animation. I was also heavily inspired by some YouTube animators who animated entirely on photoshop. They introduced me to things like video layers, which in this photo are all the purple bars. These layers really helped me to organize my animation. For example, my character and the background are on entirely different layers, which means that I could independently edit both if I wanted to without having to surgically remove the character from the background as if it were a single drawing.
After Effects: The Compositing
After making my animation in Photoshop, I then rendered out the MOV file and put it into After Effects. This was in order to add sound effects and work on the timing if I didn’t like, which is exactly what I did. During the compiling process, I realized that one scene was too short. So, in After Effects, I managed to make the scene longer than what I initially animated which gave me more room to add sound effects. After many hours of drawing and editing, I present to you…
The Result
I am honestly really happy with how this turned out. I learned a lot from this process. It made me better at drawing different perspectives, and also made me a better editor.
Music Production
Another end of the year project that we were tasked with was creating our own music. From the moment I stepped into class and saw the piano keyboards sitting on our desks, I had been excited for this project. I had always wanted to make cool music, but never had the resources to do so. So, when we were given this project, I was especially excited.
The program that I used to create the entire song is Pro Tools. Here in the screenshot you can see all the different MIDI Layers and plugins used. Each individual row has a different instrument playing different things.
This is my song. I tried to draw inspiration from producers like Kanye and Tyler the Creator. Although not on the same level as those producers, I am happy with my result.