Introduction
What is the Zenith project?
At the end of our Senior year at Freestyle Academy, we create one final project at the end of the year called our Zenith. We have freedom to do almost anything within or related to our elective class, and so this project is both a representation of our passions and a culmination of the skills we’ve learned during our time here.
Our Zenith
For my Zenith project in Animation, I chose to work with my close friend Sofia Dominguez. Earlier in the year, we collaborated with another friend Aditi Biswas to write a story for our world building project in English. We wanted to take these characters and make them come alive, and so we ultimately created an opening animation for our story as if it were a real cartoon!
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 for storytelling.
Context
For some quick context, our story takes place in a fantasy world with four tribes of magic: Sigil, Music, Alchemy, and Blacksmith.
Our main cast consists of:
Tala, our 18 year old main character who is a member of the Sigil Tribe
Sol, a 15 year old member of the music tribe
Wren, a 19 year old member of the Alchemy Tribe
Lazarus, a 29 year old silly guy.
Pre-Production
Pre-Production: Initial Explorations
The first thing we did was sit down with some binder paper and start drawing. We knew we wanted to tell a story about our characters from our world building project, but we didn’t know what. The first thing we actually came up with was a college AU!
That didn’t really go anywhere though. Sofia then had the idea of creating a short, very polished 20 second animation of all of our characters jumping towards the camera showing their forms of magic. This was super cool, but I wanted to do something a little more narrative driven, and that’s when we thought of making a cartoon opening!
Pre-Production: Studies
Now that we knew what we wanted to do, we studied some intro animations! Through this, we noticed the main purposes seemed to be getting the viewer excited for the episode & series, to communicate the overall feel of the show, and to introduce the main characters.
The following were big inspirations to us:
Pre-Production: Storyboarding
First, we picked a SONG! We had to find a song that felt up-beat, like it fit our characters and their dynamics, and could be cut up into a shorter piece and still feel complete. We ultimately picked the song “Bad Set of Moods” by Soul Low!
Then we got to actually start planning out our animation! Sofia started by making messy sketches of storyboards on paper that fit with the lyrics, and then brought it to me in class where we both collaborated on it.
Then, we re-drew the storyboard and fleshed it out more digitally! We created four scenes, centered on each character, starting with our main character and ending with a split screen of all four and the story name.
Pre-Production: Design & Style Evolution
Originally, we had created these designs we made for our characters during our world building project, but we weren’t quite happy with them. They didn’t really fit our characters personalities and they looked a little odd, and so we decided to revise them!
We changed a few things about the clothing like Sol’s dress and Lazarus’s pants and boots, but most of the changes were the colors. Lazarus especially got a whole pirate makeover, and we changed Tala’s color palette to be more purple, and Sol’s to be more yellow.
Then we had to figure out how to keep our style consistent throughout the animation. We usually have pretty different styles, and we end up drawing different pieces of the animation and putting them together, which makes it look less cohesive.
To try and prevent this as much as possible, we picked a style we would both stick to and created a reference sheet of the characters in that style!
Production
Production: Keyframing
The first step to actually producing our animation was keyframing! This is essentially where you sketch the most important frames in the animation, usually the start and end of each big movement.
Once we had all of our keyframes done (which took FOREVER) we made an animatic! We compiled it all into After Effects and synced it to the music to make sure everything fit well together, and to make sure we at least had something to show if we weren’t able to finish the final product on time. Here is that animatic!
Production: In-Betweens
Next we had to do the in-betweens. This is the step where we turned the choppy keyframe animation into a smoother animation. To do this we basically created a frame in between two keyframes, and then more frames in between those, etc. until all the frames were drawn! We also tried to ease motions in and out to make them more dynamic.
This was a LOT of painful sketching and slightly re-thinking shots that didn’t really work (oops). I think this was probably the longest part of the process, since it was a lot of drawing and difficult to get right.
Production: Lines & Color
The final step in the production phase was to line and color all of our animations! In order to keep the style more consistent, we actually each lined each others sketches. This also helped us avoid burnout, since we got to work on a new drawing!
Coloring was super simple too, since we already had color palettes for each character, and we could mostly use paint bucket.
Post-Production
Post-Production: Color Adjustments
Once we had compiled our finished animations into After Effects, it was time for post-production! The first step of this was color adjustment.
We added a lot adjustment layers, and changed hue/saturation and brightness/contrast for many scenes to make the scene feel more cohesive.
I also used a color change effect to lighten the lineart, to make it less distracting, and added cast shadows using masks and blend modes.
Post-Production: Lighting
Another HUGE part of post-production was lighting! For the opening scene of our animation, we wanted to have animated lighting as the door of Tala’s tent blows open, and so for my Advanced Learning Project in Digital Media, I learned how to create a lighting effect with blend modes and radial blur.
Here is what that looked like, and a tutorial video I created for the effect!
For more details on how to create this effect yourself, here is a tutorial video I created!
Post-Production: Finishing Touches
Finally, we added a few finishing touches. We really wanted to have the sigil in the opening shot animate and glow, and so I animated the paths of the sigil, and then used the lighting effects I learned to make it glow!
I made the sigil in its own composition, and then put that into our full composition and changed the blend mode to overlay. This made it look like it was glowing, and I keyframed the opacity in order to make it fade in and out.
Then, I added another layer on top with a keyframed radial blur, to add this lighting effect!
We also added the title bouncing out at the end, as seen here:
And added the names of the characters to introduce them more clearly, as seen here!
Completed Project
Finally, our animation was done! Here is the final product!
Here is our recorded Zenith presentation, too! We go more in-depth about our process, and answer questions at the end:
Reflection
The process was long and stressful, but Sofia and I both learned so much from it. We got a lot better at organizing large projects and truly collaborating on every step of it. Every single thing in our finished animation is something we both worked on, which I think is really cool!
If we could do this project again, I think we would try to study more intro animations and figure out how to show worldbuilding better, because it wasn’t super clear how the magic system works in this world. We would also try to add more depth to our animations, since we didn’t really make use of foreground or background, which caused some animations to look a little flat.
Still, both of us are so proud of the work we put in and everything we learned from it. I’ve gained so many skills, especially in organization and composition, that will allow me to better tell stories through different mediums, and that’s extremely valuable to me! I’m super happy with how our project turned out too, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to create something I’m so passionate about with one of my favorite people. I hope that our passion really shines through our work, and inspires you to go create something too.