Hi! My name is Nicholas Te. I am a senior at Los Altos High School and have been attending Freestyle Academy for two years. At Freestyle I have chosen to study animation. I have always been really into animation, as I think that as an art form, the possibilities are limitless.
For my Showcase, I decided to choose my two end of year projects from my Animation class.
Reel
Here are some other projects that I’ve done.
Swordplay
I chose my explorations project because it was the culmination of all my 2D animation skills thus far. I spent a lot of time working on the eye animation and footstep animation and I didn’t have enough time to work on expanding the end with finer details. However, I would like to know what I can add, since I also want to learn how to draw impact frames and things like that.
The Forest
When beginning this project, I already knew that I wanted to do a horror animation. I think that the horror genre, if done right, is very good at making people feel intense scary emotions. When looking for inspiration on youtube, I came across a youtuber called Kane Pixels. He has an analog horror type series which feels very realistic despite only being animated. I felt inspired by the realistic handheld camera animation he included and decided I wanted to incorporate it into my own animation. I also wanted to incorporate an eerie monster in my animation like Kane Pixels did. He is especially inspiring since he is actually our age and is able to animate at what I’d argue is a movie production quality.
Before starting this project, I had never used Blender before. I decided to use Blender because when I was using Maya, I found very few tutorials for the things I was trying to do. However, there are thousands of Blender videos for every type of animation you want to do, including a Kane Pixels style animation.
Before Blender, I wasn’t that into 3D animation since I found Maya to be overly complicated and preferred 2D animation. However, after using Blender, I definitely have more of a passion for 3D animation and actually prefer it now. In the future, I plan to make more analogue horror animations like this one and animations in general. I also want to learn more about environmental design and get better at lighting since I feel that my dark forest wasn’t too realistic and looked more like a video game. In all, I am pretty satisfied with how my animation turned out. If I had more time, I would have added some more scenes and dabbled a bit more with the environmental design, but I am still pretty proud of how it turned out.