THE ULTIMATE STORY ANIMATION OF WONDER AND JUSTICE

Ahoy There!

Our BIGGEST project in Exploring Animation so far is finally complete! *confetti and party horns* And what is this project, you may ask? It's none other than the 2D story animation! And finally, after weeks spent in Photoshop and After Effects, it's finally complete!

Here it is for your viewing pleasure-


THE PLOT

The main plot of this animation revolves around a girl named Micah, who is walking sadly along the street with a camera in her hands. She looks down at it, upset that she has a camera but nothing interesting to take a picture of.

Not before long, she's blasted with a strong gust of wind, causing her to turn around and investigate. When she does, she is met with a strange, white, pulsating sky blob. Intrigued, she whips out her camera to take a photo. The viewfinder slowly shifts around the blob, before the blob forms into the shape of a person -- a ghost. Before Micah can snap the photo, the ghost zooms away, leaving her confused and alone. Thinking that she didn't get the picture, she turns back to continue walking and once again takes a look at her camera -- to see that she indeed snapped a picture of the ghost. The animation cuts to an over-the-shoulder shot, before slowly zooming out to reveal the ghost watching over her as the screen fades to black.

THE PROCESS

As with all story-based projects, I started out by drawing up a storyboard. It's nothing special, just sketching up the major frames of each scene as if it were a comic, along with any necessary notes. After the storyboarding phase came the creation of any necessary assets (such as character bodies, backgrounds, and effects) in Photoshop. This was probably the most fun part for me, because I love drawing. After each and every asset was created, it was time to import them into After Effects. The way I did it, I imported each character file as a separate pre-composition to keep things tidy, but it was still fairly fickle (especially with anchor points, who are now my worst enemy). Many pre-comps, layers, and Gaussian Blurs later, it was finished and exported!

I mainly learned how to deal with lengthier projects and multiple pre-compositions in one main composition, along with making backgrounds (which I am terrible at). Aside from that, most methods used were ones I had already learned and (somewhat) perfected. The main obstacles I overcame were working around same files that needed to be in two places at once (prompting me to duplicate a bunch of the original files), making sure the right animations happen in the right place at the right time, and... anchor points. I'll never forgive those anchor points.

But with that, I've completed the final project in our 2D animation unit! Up next is my first step into 3D animation in Maya!

Thanks for reading,
Tate

FEATURE STORY PROJECT

Hello everyone, I'm back with another project for my Sophomore Video class! This time, we had to make a feature story like on you would see on the news. It's like the previous interview project, but a little more fleshed out and requiring more work and attention.

We were split into groups of four, similarly to the last project, but from what I can remember there were no specifically assigned roles. All we needed was for someone to shoot the footage, get the b-roll, do some voice-over, edit it, submit it, watch it, regret it, re-edit it, and submit it again hopefully with less mistakes. Requirements for the finished product were two or more interviews, a delayed lead, and overall a generally high level of quality. Also B-roll. Lots of B-roll.

My group decided to interview a French student and one of the French teachers to get some insight as to what goes on in French class, along with some thoughts regarding the Summer 2018 trip to Paris. It was cool to hear about, because I almost went along but decided not to because I am nowhere near ready for international travel.

But I digress. Two of my teammates were in charge of interviewing and getting most of the footage, while I took up the job of editing the clips so that they were easier to work with, along with editing my own video separately from the rest of my team. I also had to put together my own delayed lead with voice-over, because I don't think we had gotten it finished in class and I was too awkward to ask if it was done and I didn't want to bother my teammates by asking every five seconds. So I put together the delayed lead in the comfort of my own house, and recorded voice-over using my own microphone as well. I chose to go with a staccato delayed lead, and while I usually hate the way my voice sounds I was proud of it.

After the first edit, the video was actually four minutes long- MUCH more lengthy than it needed to be. But with perseverance and begrudging removal of solid yet unnecessary footage, I was able to splice it down to two minutes and was left with (what I think is) a fairly interesting peek into the ONW French program.

Here it is if you would like to see it...


If I did this project again, I would continue to clean up the footage to make it more visually appealing and try to include footage that provided better context as to what was going on. I'm happy with the re-edit, but as we all know, nothing's perfect. I would keep everything else the same.

To finish, I'm happy with the end product, and I hope you enjoyed it as well.

And please don't make fun of my voice. Please.

Thanks for reading,
Tate