Hello! My name is Rye Donaldson, and I’m an Animation student at Freestyle Academy. I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember, and more than that I’ve always loved telling stories through my art! I was always a little intimidated by animation, but Freestyle really pushed me past that, and now it’s one of my favorite mediums. Aside from drawing and animation, I love to crochet in my free time, and more recently I also started developing my own videogames! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For my Showcase, I’ve chosen my Zenith project from Animation, which I worked on with my close friend Sofia Dominguez. Earlier in the year, we collaborated with another friend Aditi Biswas to write a story for our worldbuilding project in English. We wanted to build on this, and so we created an opening animation for our story as if it were a real cartoon! I chose to showcase this project because I feel it really shows a culmination of my skills, from storytelling to composition to post-production. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I would really appreciate feedback on the composition\/flow of our animation, as well as the storytelling. How can I better show story and worldbuilding, and how can I better compose shots (both to show story, and in general)? For the more technical side of things, how can I make my animations look more smooth\/dynamic and cohesive?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ll be attending UC Santa Cruz next year, as a CS: Game Design major. While it’s not animation, videogames are another medium I love to tell stories through, and I’ll be making use of and building on many of the skills I’ve learned from Animation and Freestyle! Animation will certainly continue to be a hobby for me, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Feel free to reach out to me at rye.donaldson@gmail.com for any information or questions!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here is my Showcase video, where I give some context to our project, explain our process, and break down the scenes of our animation!<\/p>\n\n\n\n