introduction

For the explorations project, all Juniors get to explore a topic that interests them and requires skills that they would like to improve on.

I’m an Animation student, so I chose to create several short pose-to-pose looped animations in order to practice principles of animation that I hadn’t really sat down to understand.

In English, I wrote a lyrical essay exploring my anxiety, especially in relation to fear of failure, exploring star-related metaphors.

Finally in Digital Media, I explored using Virtual Instruments in Pro Tools in order to write a short instrumental song.

explorations project: idea + research

For this project, I wanted to create several rough pose-to-pose and looped animations, focusing on the animation over drawing quality, anatomy, etc. I realized I had somewhat ignored a lot of principles of animation throughout the year, and I really wanted to improve my animation skills so that I can create more natural movement.

Easing is essentially animating acceleration by drawing more frames at the beginning/end of a movement and less in the middle. Overshooting is when you draw some frames past where a motion is meant to stop, and then going back again. These were both principles I didn’t really think about or use as much as I should have this year, so I wanted to try to learn them!

explorations project: process

For the first animation, a friend suggested I draw a wagging tail, so I drew a cat. Since this tail had a sort of pendulum motion, I didn’t use overshooting for this one, but I did use easing!

For the second animation, I drew the autism creature bouncing (also at the request of another friend)! I also couldn’t really use overshooting here, but I used easing.

I call the third animation “bonk!” because a person is quite literally getting hit with a ball. For this one, I used easing again but also overshooting! It’s a bit subtle, but there is one frame to the right of when the person is at the upright position.

explorations project: final product

Here are my final animations!

animation: reflection

I’m definitely very happy with how these came out! I think I achieved my goal of focusing on learning to animate better. While I wish I could have done more of them, given the fact that I only had two weeks to do this project, I’m pretty proud of what I did. The skills I gained from this will definitely be super helpful when I have the time to create a longer animation (hopefully to a song)!

lyrical essay

In English, we wrote lyrical essays exploring any topic of our choosing! I decided to talk about my anxiety, since it’s something that has been affecting me a lot recently, but also something I’m learning to cope with. Here is the full lyrical essay and annotated bibliography!

experimental music

In Digital Media, we learned how to use Virtual Instruments in Pro Tools to create our own songs! I wasn’t really sure what to make or how to start since I have almost no prior music experience, but I still had fun with it nonetheless. I didn’t really have any specific inspiration for this music either, although I think it sounds a bit like something from a game. Here is the song I came up with!

[insert SoundCloud embed here once it’s posted]

If I could do it again, I would do it very differently, but that means I definitely learned from this. I’m proud of the ending section, and the last few notes after the pause at the end. I think the tempo changed quite abruptly before the ending section and it maybe doesn’t fit very well, but I like it on its own.

Overall, while I definitely have a long way to go when it comes to music production, learning to use Virtual Instruments was really fun. Now that I’ve learned how to use them I think I’ll definitely experiment more with making music in the future and try to improve!