Introduction
The explorations unit at freestyle was our very last of the junior year. It challenges us to explore a new way of thinking or creating by doing things we hadn’t before. This unit, while lacking in time spent, still felt like one of the most impactful due to all of the things I learned from it. Starting with poetry, and leading into the explorations Project in Animation, this unit was incredibly fun, rushed, and fulfilling all at the same time. I felt like I truly learned some things that I would remember forever and would leave a significant mark on my future just from these couple of weeks. In my animation class, I decided to focus on developing my skills of technological literacy by learning how to use after effects better through creating a manga edit. In English class, my poem focused on the significance of life and helped me develop my creativity and social and civic responsibility along with the poem production in digital media
Explorations Project
For the explorations project in animation, we were given free reign to do nearly whatever we wanted, as long as it was something we hadn’t done before or were learning how to do better. For my project, I decided I wanted to learn how to use after effects and do motion graphics by doing a manga edit.
In order to come to the idea of creating a manga edit, I have to first explain some of my inspirations. One large inspiration as to making me believe that I could feasibly pull it off was one of the Freestyle senior’s Zenith project which was a more complicated manga edit. This made me see someone’s process on doing a similar thing and gave me the idea that I could do it. Somebody whose work was incredibly important into making me want to make a manga edit is the editor Ninjarasticninja. He makes incredibly manga edits and throughout my process his works were a large inspiration and model as to the quality I would strive for. However, I had only about a week to do this and so knew that I would get nowhere near that level of quality.
My process on making this project began with doing some research. While I had used aftereffects before to do things like compile clips of videos in projects like the animated narrative and walk cycle, I had never seriously used it or even touched any of it’s 3d features. Because of this I had to start by watching some youtube videos on the process of creating a manga animation like the one I was hoping to create as well as just general things like 3d camera movement in aftereffects. These videos ended up being super helpful for understanding the general process and workflow of manga animation which brings me nicely into my process of making the edit.
To begin, since I already knew what manga and character I wanted to edit (The Chronoweaver Majik from Ichi the Witch) I had to figure out which panels I wanted to use. I went through the chapters I knew would be relevant to find the panels I thought were necessary enough to convey the moment that was happening and would have things that I could try and animate
After I had found the panels I began work on the most tedious part of the process, separating moving layers in photoshop so that I would be able to animate them in after effects. I had to create a photoshop file for every single panel I wanted to move and had to create new layers for every single part I would be animating. Additionally, because the original drawings aren’t moving, I would have to fill in the parts underneath what I wanted to move so that when it moved it wouldnt leave a visible blank space. This process took very long and was also probably the least fun part for me.
Finally is the most fun part of the process, actually going into aftereffects, animating, arranging, and polishing the edit. This part took a while but was really fun the whole time. I started it by just animating each of the panels, most of the time by setting up rigs using the after effects puppet tool, but sometimes simply just by keyframing the position and rotation of the layer I wanted to move. After I had finished the animation of each of the panels I had to make the camera move and showcase the panels and movement in a cool way. This part was the last step of my process and by this point I had mostly run out of time so I couldnt make the camera movements as smooth as I wanted to.
Eventually though, I finished all of this process and created something that I am very proud of using tools that I was almost completely new to using. The following video is the completed edit.
I really valued the freedom that we were granted with the explorations project. It allowed me to create something that I was really passionate about. This made me want to work on it more and make it the best It could possibly be within the time that I had. Through this project, I learned that I really enjoy using aftereffects and I really want to do more things like this in the future. I think this significantly benefitted my technological literacy by understanding how to use aftereffects, and this additionally helped my understanding of keyframe animation due to aftereffects keyframe based rig system.
Poetry Exploration
We had significantly more time for the poetry part of our explorations project and that made it turn out quite well in my opinion. We started out our poetry unit in English by doing three poetry workshops. The first workshop was about taking a random newspaper article, reading it, and centering the poem around the contents of that newspaper article. This challenged me to consider current events and data when writing a poem. Before this, I had considered poems to be more metaphorical and have meaning that is difficult to understand and easy to misconstrue. But after this, I understood that poetry could condense the meaning of 100 words into that of 10 just based on how they are said, it was incredibly interesting and helped me a lot with my final explorations poem. The next workshop we did was involving cento poems, or poems created using lines from other poems. This workshop showed me that even with using someone else’s words, a writers voice can still stand out as unique and entirely separate from somebody else’s. This would help me later on when reading other poems for inspiration on my exploration poem. Our final workshop was ars poetica poems or poems about what poetry is to you. I focused my ars poetica poem on the positioning of the words which was useful for ideas and inspiration.
My actual final explorations poem did not end up being any from the workshops as I was not particularly satisfied with any of them. I would make my own, centered around the idea of a dead spider on the wall. I got the idea from the fact that I had killed a spider the night before
My final poem, titled Spider On the Wall, ended up being better than I had expected it to turn out. I think that while I started out with a pretty rough draft but eventually edited it and revised it with the help of Mr Greco and my peers and turned it into something that I really like
Spider on the wall
I took a life today
and left a body rotting on the wall
Why did it have to move like that?
Gangly limbs, that dangled in an unnerving manner
Each one now stagnant
Why did it look like that?
A large blot, wriggling through the air on a fine net of silver thread
Thread that I will clean up in seconds, erasing any of its trace
Why did it scare me so much?
I’m so much bigger than it
The bottom of my palm was enough
Why did its carapace shatter under the weight of my fist?
This hand born to birth creations of my imagination and prose
Degraded to the likes of a gun
Why…
Is it my fault?
It was simply my reaction
If anything, should my instincts not be to blame
I am but a fellow animal, born to live and die…
Right?
Why did I kill it
The final step of the explorations poetry process was the poetry production in digital media class. This part, similar to all the other parts of the explorations project was very broad in what we were allowed to make. The only real requirements were that your spoken poem had to be playing in the background and there had to be some animated/moving elements in the production. I decided to use my abilities I had learned from my animation explorations project and use after effects. To begin, I drew a simple spider in photoshop, making sure to keep its body and all of its legs on separate layers so that I would be able to animate each part of it individually later on in after effects. Then I imported the spider, along with a wall and floor I had also made in photoshop and set up a 3d environment. Then after finishing the keyframe animation of the spider limbs, I decided to also make each of my questions in the poem come downwards from alternating walls. I did this for two reasons, the first was so that the visuals didn’t get too boring and the second was so that it reinforced the illusion that the spider was climbing up the wall.
I conveyed the meaning and spirit of my poem through the movement of the spider. In my poem, a key part of it is the uncanny movement of a spider that causes the narrator to kill the spider. Because of this, I decided to focus on the spider’s movement in my production. I also decided to have the questioning lines, appear on the walls, as to emphasize the questioning and uncertainty the narrator feels.
I Valued being able to create whatever type of video we wanted for this project, giving us freedom to represent our poems however we liked, as long as there was some sort of animated effects. This gave us nearly complete freedom and made the project very fun to work on.