Introduction
Hello! My name is Sara Loveridge and I’m an Animation student at Freestyle Academy. During my time here at Freestyle, I’ve been given the opportunity to learn a multitude of media and grow my kit as an artist. I’m thankful for all the challenges that were given to me that allowed me to grow and learn, even the challenge of staying in my room all day and sitting in front of a computer for class.
After my time at high school ends, I’m planning to attend San Francisco State University in a design-focused degree, however, I also plan on taking an online animation course later at iAnimate or Animation Mentor since I love 3D animation and hope to peruse it. My goal for a career is mainly in the movie or game industry and to continue to contribute to beautiful and inspirational scenes!
Thank you for taking the time to review my works and I hope to be able to grow from your criticism!
Dead Mom AMV
My first project was my Zenith project and I decided to create an AMV of the song Dead Mom from Beetlejuice: the Musical. This song is about a teenage girl, Lydia, refusing to move on from her recently deceased mom and singing about her rage towards her dad for moving on too quickly.
For this project, I really wanted to replicate the sense of emotion that’s felt in the singing, with the moments of desperation quickly turning to blind anger. I had hoped for more complex rigging on the character, but due to time, I had to ditch any facial rigging ideas. I learned Blender on my own to aid me in this project, and I had also used the class-learned experience of Maya, Substance Painter, After Effects, and Z-Brush. The character design is my own spin on the current Broadway costume design, with style inspiration from Tim Burton. I had wanted the long and skinny arms and legs to look like bigger eyes and heads, much like the puppets from Corpse Bride.
While a part of me is proud that I completed this big of a project by myself, having to create the entire set, model/rigging and animation, I still feel like I could’ve done better. I wish the animation felt smoother and more natural, I should’ve looked at more references for the movements and created shots myself to reference. I still am extremely proud of the model I created, since it was exactly what I was hoping to achieve with the look I had in mind.
Paper Stop Motion
For this project, we were required to create an animation using paper cut-outs. I chose to do a scenic view of a cat walking in the city at night.
I really wanted to have a cool-toned, serene scene that had a cat as the main focal point. At first, I had planned to do a lakeside view with the night sky reflecting off the water, but I wasn’t quite sure how to translate that onto paper. I had also wanted to keep away from perfect cut shapes and have jagged lines just to keep a sort of abstract look. This animation was extremely difficult, despite it being quite short since the cat’s front leg was made up of three separate pieces which were all very tiny and had to be moved quite carefully with a toothpick.
While I love the atmosphere of this small animation, I do wish I had implemented layers somehow so that the background could’ve moved past the cat. I also didn’t realize how dramatic the moon and stars had been moved since I was so focused on the movement of the cat’s front paws, so the twinkling effect I wanted didn’t turn out quite right. But for not only my first paper stop motion animation but my first time animating a cat, I’m quite proud of the outcome and the fluid movements.
Reflection of Growth
Throughout my time at Freestyle, these two projects are a reflection of my passion and style. I’ve put a lot of effort and time into these and especially my zenith was a huge passion project. Before Freestyle I had only really dipped my toes with animation, only attending summer camps here and there, so this was a full-on submerge for me. I’m really glad I was able to be a part of this experience since it really helped my love and passion for animation grow, especially character animation and modeling. Having completed projects to show to people, instead of just constantly imagining them in my mind, is such an amazing feeling and I hope to bring more of my ideas to fruition. Freestyle has provided me with a large array of software to learn and thanks to them I’ve also learned how to effectively use them, and bring knowledge into other programs with similar UIs. Using these past two years to learn about animation definitely was a great decision since I rekindled an old love to create art and flared my love for animation in general.