When the Explorations project was assigned to us I was extremely excited, as it was all about what we wanted to focus on getting better at. I used this project as an excuse to practice fighting sequences and action lines. I’m used to animating moving mouths and walking however when it comes to complex animation like punches and different poses, mine always seemed to appear choppy.
The 21st century skill I used was Self-Direction. I had finished my Documentary a little bit earlier than others so I had a nice head start on the Explorations Project. I used this time to map out my ideas as well as how I could use my time. I found that this way I was the most productive.
I decided to create 3 sequences, one that was just a rough outline, one that was semi coloured and one that was fully coloured.
The rough outline one (the one pictured above) I used things like action lines, key-framing and exaggeration to portray a cartoonish style, which was heavily inspired by Animaniacs.
The semi coloured one I wanted to do just to practice coloring or the action of coloring each individual frame.
The fully coloured one I knew it was something that I had to be interested in doing, as it was going to take up most of my time. I eventually decided that I wanted to recreate the opening of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I knew I could not recreate the whole thing, and so I decided to just animate the “Water” and “Earth” portion.
Reflection
This had to be one of my favorite projects, just the overall freedom we were given was really nice. The prompt wasn’t too broad but it wasn’t too narrow either. I had a lot of fun experimenting with different ideas and different references. I am very happy with how it turned out and overall am very satisfied with what I practiced and created.