- Miro board: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOHGQ1AA=/
- Statement of Intent: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_9PNI-UqC8dHN_Q5wrE2NGOotXpgrZ0w61orzaoAPaM/edit?usp=sharing
- Proof of concept 1: https://vimeo.com/685644747
- Animatic 1: https://vimeo.com/686090353
- Proof of concept 2: https://vimeo.com/703421602
- Animatic 2: https://vimeo.com/703499404
- Rough Animation: https://vimeo.com/715538832
- Final Animation: https://vimeo.com/720311201
Exploratory Practices 3
With all the feedback from the second interim, I was ready to begin working on my animation. However, I also had to do the clean-up work for the RCA student as part of Informed Practices: I spent most of my Easter break focusing on that, since learning to use Adobe Animate and matching the student’s style was much more time-consuming than I anticipated. I eventually finished it and made something I was proud of, but it admittedly set me back with my own project, which might not have been very wise of me in terms of time management.
Once I did begin working on my own animation, I started with the backgrounds: keeping them lineless was a challenge, as it’s a technique I hadn’t practiced much beforehand, but the end result looked fairly clean and organised (which was also helped by the limited colour palettes). The hardest shots were the campfire scene (due to the angle and complex lighting) and the classroom (due to the alien aesthetic of the furniture and the various student designs), but in the end, I’d say all the backgrounds work for what they were trying to do.
For the green scenes, I added some canvases and paintings to the background, to show that the human is a prolific artist, addressing the feedback regarding that. The art gallery was another one I edited significantly: instead of including random images, I created silhouetted versions of images found within the Golden Record. People who aren’t aware of the Record will simply see these as random images, whereas people who know of it will recognize and appreciate it, so it works either way, and I’m happy with the result. Using real images from the Record in the classroom (with an added scan effect to make them look older and more tech-like) was also a fun addition.
Then came the rough animations: everything was fairly straight-forward, but still challenging: doing the dancing for the campfire scene was especially tricky, as I wanted it to have a good sense of movement and be made up of poses that would translate to good shadows (that would be projected on the wall behind the man). The website scenes (which I decided to section off with a blue colour scheme, instead of connecting them to the purple scene) were very simple, as it was mainly mouse and camera movements that I fully did with tweens. I managed to complete all the rough animation in time for the final presentations.
In terms of collaboration, I got my coursemates to help design some aliens for the final classroom scene, and a friend in the Sound Design course lent me his high-quality microphone to record a good take of the dialogue. I put it through some voice editors I found online to make it sound more “alien”, which I think worked out well enough.
The final presentation went well, and I was given some light feedback regarding timing and colour grading. Now I have to complete all the lineart and colours in just over a week: it’s a lot of work, and I’m not sure I’ll manage to get it all done, but I’ll do my best.
Exploratory Practices 2
After the first interim, I had a pretty solid idea on where to go next with my project. With a new rough script ready, I began trying to build an animation around it: to enhance and build off of the words, rather than overshadow them. Since one of the main feedbacks from the interim was to try and make the scenes feel more connected, the first concept sketches were all based on connection, with each time period flowing into the next almost seamlessly, through objects that would carry through between them. The dust from a cave painting going into a Renaissance artist’s paint, which would be used for a painting that gets shown in a museum, which gets photographed and posted online, and so on.
I also decreased the number of separate scenes / time periods the animation would go through: this was in hopes of making it simpler to follow, and making the connections feel more relevant and important. With those few ideas in mind, I drew some simple thumbnails for the whole animation. The shots and time periods would remain almost unchanged from here on out, with only a couple shots being slightly altered to help with the story’s flow.
A suggestion from the interim I also kept in mind was the idea to keep humans “ambiguous” until the very end of the animation: this could help add some payoff to the alien reveal, and make for slightly more nuanced storytelling. To pull it off, I framed all the shots to never directly show a human face: they would always either be out of frame, turned away from the camera, or covered by something else (e.g. a mask in a campfire scene). This approach made me think a lot harder about how to frame each shot: including faces in a composition is such an obvious thing, that having to consider how to cut them out without sacrificing any storytelling information was a challenge. But in the end, I think it made for much more interesting shot choices overall, while maintaining the ambiguity of the species (as if they were being observed by an alien species), and I’m glad I went with this approach.
Before starting work on the full animatic, I wanted to finalize the professor’s design: while the paper drawing I drew after the first interim was good, it didn’t quite feel finished, and some details needed changing. Mainly, the suction cups on his arms would have been very tough to animate consistently, so I decided to remove them (while still keeping his arms the same). I also slightly changed his pupils: while I do think the octopus eyes I gave him were pretty cool, there was something about them that made them feel a bit lifeless, so I switched to a more normal eye-shape.
For the colour scheme, I simply went with the same one I gave the previous design, as it still worked well enough to show him as a benevolent (but clearly non-human) character.
Finally, I started working on my animatic: the shots were kept almost identical to the thumbnails, only really changing a shot in the campfire scene and removing a close-up of the students in the classroom scene (in favour of a panning shot).
To keep the scenes distinct from one another, I used a different colour for each time period: red for the earliest scenes, green for the painter scenes, purple for the museum and website, and black for the classroom. Originally, the idea was to have each period have a limited colour palette, shared between the backgrounds and humans.
With all the boards done, I did a rough recording of myself reading the script, only to find that it was slightly too long to properly fit. I cut out a few words and sections to make it flow better, and it managed to fit within about 80 seconds. I timed everything out according to the sound, and connected all the scenes together in a single file.
I considered what to do for the background music for a while: keeping it quiet the whole way through (excluding the narration) felt a bit creepy, but I also didn’t want to use music without a good reason. That is when I had an idea: the Voyager Golden Record was a big inspiration when first starting the project, as it was a display of humankind’s creative nature and its curiosity towards space and alien life. It contained various images and, most importantly, songs: and with a quick search and listen, I was able to find some instrumental tracks that could work great as background music.
I eventually went with Beethoven’s “Cavatina” string quartet: it’s a very calm song, with a hint of sombre to it, which I thought worked great with an alien talking about our art in a future where we’re supposedly long-gone. I made it play throughout the human scenes, from the beginning of the animation to the start of the classroom scene, at which point the sound goes silent besides the professor’s voice as he talks directly to his class.
The decision to include the Golden Record also affected the ending: originally the professor simply clicked a button on a remote, and the screen cut to black. But after including the music, I decided to add the Record itself to the professor’s desk, making the soundtrack be diegetic. And instead of cutting straight to black, the professor’s remote activates the record, playing Johnny B. Goode (another song from within the Record), accompanying the credits with an upbeat tune. I believe this made for a much more entertaining ending to the piece, and I’m very happy I decided to change the ending to make it work.
Then came the time to make a proof of concept: to give myself an idea on how I wanted the animation to look like, I made some rough colour tests on my phone, making each environment monotone. However, when discussing my ideas with Stuart, I was given the suggestion to make them duotone somehow. I took that idea and decided to make the humans contrast the backgrounds with their colours: green humans for the red scenes, yellow humans for the purple scenes and so on. Making them stand out gave the animation a much more distinct feel, so I started working on the proof of concept with that in mind.
Since I had a lot of work to get done, I decided to base the proof of concept on a simple scene: going from the green painting room to the purple art gallery, to showcase how the scene transitions would work, as well as showing the human colours contrasting with their environments. I decided to make the backgrounds lineless, to further separate them from the humans.
The transition between scenes went well, but a zoom-out from the painting to the art gallery’s full room gave me some trouble: since I’d forgotten about ToonBoom’s camera node movement and 3D layer system, I simply stretched the whole art to fit the shot, which made some lines appear too thin and pixelated. I would later fix this problem in the final animation by using actual camera movement, but the proof of concept shows my forgetfulness. Still, I believe it shows off my animation’s style quite well, so I’m happy with it overall.
With everything done, I put everything in a presentation and got ready to showcase everything for the second interim.
Overall, everything was well-received, my classmates liked the tone and vibe of the animation, and the tutors were happy with the changes I made, from the story to the character designs. The feedback was less substantial than before, but still useful: including real (or parodied) paintings in the art gallery, using a voice distorter for the narration to make it sound more alien, giving the green scenes more artistic inspiration, and including images from the Voyager were some of the main ones. I was also suggested to cut down on the classtime at the end, but I personally really liked those scenes, as it felt like a proper payoff to the mystery surrounding the first minute of animation. Still, I took note of all the feedback and considered how to act on it moving forward.
At this point, I realised how much there was to do and how little time there was to do it: rough animation, clean-up and colour in just over a month’s time felt crazy, but I knew I’d do my best to get it all done in time.
Exploratory Practice 1
In late February, we were given a briefing over the new main project we’d be focusing on until the end of the year: a 1-to-2 minute animation, to be made individually, on a subject that speaks to us. The vastness of the prompt scared me at first: a lack of limits over what to discuss sounded open enough to confuse me, and have me struggle with what to base it on. Thanks to an exercise presentation we made, I examined my favorite pieces of media and noticed the recurring aspects of emotionally honest storytelling, and the genre of sci-fi, with aliens and advanced technology being a favorite of mine since childhood. The vastness of space allows for a wide range of unique stories, which is really exciting to me.
I also considered examining the topic of what makes humans what we are, and decided that to be making stories, as it’s an action unique to us on Earth.
I started sketching out some basic ideas, including an alien and a robot talking on a grassy hill, and an alien professor teaching a class. In general, I wanted to explore the idea of humanity through the eyes of a non-human, and having them see us as a species worth loving and noticing: I’m often tired of stories where aliens see humans as lowly and inferior to them, so I wanted to make a story that showed us in a better light.
Having discussed my ideas with the tutors, I decided to move forward with the alien classroom concept: I wanted to have the professor talk about human storytelling to his class, as an introduction to his course, and explaining how it was what connected us as people, what made us who we are. I’ve always loved writing and telling stories, so this topic was very personal to me, and I wanted to get it right.
I made some brainstorming moodboards of various methods of storytelling that have been used over human history, along with some alien designs from media I’ve enjoyed over the years, to get an idea of what to talk about and how to style the video.
I figured out a way to structure the animation: short scenes showing humans through time, connecting through stories, while the professor narrates over them (with the scenes connecting thematically to his words), eventually revealing his appearance and class at the very end of the video. Keeping the alien aspect ambiguous until the ending seemed like a fun idea to experiment with, so I went ahead with it.
With the rough idea in mind, I began writing a script for the story. I wanted the animation to be driven by the narration more than the images, so getting that part done first was essential. I first wrote a bullet point list over what I wanted to talk about, and then expanded each of them into full sentences, to then connect them to one another into a coherent flow. This really helped me write, as I often think of too many ideas at once, and have a hard time putting it all down to text right away: separating the writing process into small steps made it easier for my brain to remain focused.
I recorded myself narrating this (as I planned to voice-act as the professor), and went well over 2 minutes: a clear sign I had to trim it down significantly. It was a tough process, as I enjoyed most of what I wrote, but I was eventually able to nearly halve the script from its original length, which was good enough.
With the plot done, I started designing the alien professor, as he seemed to be the most important character in the story (as the narrator). I tried a few different shapes and sizes, experimenting with typical alien design tropes (strange eyes, antennae, unusual hair etc.), until I reached a design I was happy with: still humanoid in shape, but with enough differences to clearly be an alien.
After a few colour tests, I found a colour scheme I was happy with: blue skin seemed like the best choice, as it’s distinctly nonhuman enough to make it immediately obvious.
I then made some very rough thumbnails on paper, to lay out the visuals that would play out along with the narration. Many of the ideas made here would be scrapped for the first animatic, as it would’ve been just too much in too little time.
Before doing the animatic, I worked on the proof of concept, as it seemed like a bigger task I wanted to get done with. I decided to focus on the reveal of the professor, towards the end of the animation, as it seemed important to properly visualize. I wanted it to transition from a shot of Earth in space, to a snowglobe with a replica of Earth inside it, and having the professor hold it in its hand and bring it up to his face.
I roughed out the movement needed for that to happen, including a camera move that was hard to pull off, but looked pretty cool in the end. Essentially, keeping the Earth in the middle of the frame, and having everything else move in and out of frame.
After the roughs came the clean-up and coloring, which is always a bit tedious in Harmony. I recorded myself saying a snippet of a line from the story, and lip-synced the professor saying it, which was a fun exercise. In the end, I’m very happy with how the proof of concept came out.
Finally came the animatic. Admittedly, leaving it last might not have been a great idea, as I had to rush a bit to get it all done in time. Troubles with Storyboard Pro (and my own misunderstandings) led to some frames looking rather messy, as the background and characters weren’t properly separated.
Once the images were done, I recorded myself voicing the whole script (in a rough performance that I’ll be sure to practice before the final animation), and attached it to the animatic. Timing everything out gave me some troubles, as Storyboard Pro was giving different times between the in-app video and the exported one, but I finally got something that was good enough. In the end, it clocked in at just over a minute, which was the recommended time for the project, so I was satisfied.
I presented this all to the class and tutors, fairly confident in my work. I received a lot of feedback: they liked the ending, and were generally happy with the direction I was going. There was a good amount of feedback: they advised to narrow the subject matter, as they believed storytelling to be too broad a topic. The flow of the narration could also be improved, as the beginning felt a bit clunky, and they seemed to prefer the previous design ideas for my professor than the final one, which was surprising to me.
They gave some ideas, such as upping the unfamiliarity with human customs, and possibly making the humans ambiguous until the ending, much like the aliens. I was a bit sad over the feedback on narrowing the subject matter, as writing something on storytelling was something I was very excited to do, but it all sounded like good advice I could implement.
I first tackled the professor’s design, as it seemed like an important thing to solve. Since they liked my second concept design for the professor, where I drew him as a large squid-like alien, I tried merging that with the aspects of my design that I liked the most. I’m still working on it, but I think I’m striking a balance that will be appreciated.
As for the plot, I decided to shift the focus from storytelling to the methods with which humans create art. It’s still a fairly broad subject, but it allows for a more “tactile” topic to talk about, as well as things that aliens could note as odd (“painting is using crushed rocks mixed with liquids on slices of plantlife”, etc.).
I wrote a new script, following the process I used for my original plan: it’s almost completely new, save for the ending, which I managed to save from the original script. I’ve gotten to something I’m happy with: I hope it will be appreciated by everyone else as well.
I’m still developing a look and thumbnails for the animation, but I’m thinking of making each scene have a very distinct limited colour scheme, to separate them clearly and give them all a unique feeling. Making the humans ambiguous will be hard, but I’m trying to frame shots in a way that we never see a human’s face, making it “secret” in a very obvious way.
As for helping people in their animations, I’ll be voice acting in some people’s videos as characters, and I’ve offered help in character designing to whoever wishes help in that. Some classmates have offered to help me design aliens for the classroom scene, and I’ve accepted, so that will be made easier.
I’ve been kept very busy by the clean-up work I’m doing for a RCA student as part of our other project, but I’ll still try and get something concrete done in time for the next presentation. Overall, I’m still happy with what I’m making, and I hope I can create something I can be proud of.
Toolkit 3: Week 1
For the third set of toolkits, I chose Digital Drawing; it was advertised to us as a way to learn and refine our knowledge on general skills that apply to drawing as a whole, not just animation. And since I’m very much into illustrating, it seemed like a good pick.
This first week, we went over composition; things like the rule of thirds, leading lines, contrast and lighting. All things I generally knew about, but admittedly don’t use in my own work all that much, so this was a good refresher.
Our homework was making 6 greyscale thumbnails using the skills taught in the class, with a focus on “scale”. That’s something I’ve tried (and often failed) to do in my personal projects, so this was a very welcome challenge.
I tried doing something relatively different for each of them: for the first, I made a wide shot of a gulf, surrounded by mountains, with a giant skeleton sitting at its mouth. It was an idea I had for an old personal project I never ended up finishing, so this was very exciting to do.
I’m very happy with how it came out, especially with it being the first one; the lack of colours gives it a much more surreal feeling, and the shadow casting over the water was a last-minute addition I think really adds to the eeriness of it. The mountains leading the eye to the skeleton both with their colours and positioning works fairly well, and help convey the skeleton’s incredible size.
For my second thumbnail, I tried creating a shot based on Spider-Man, a character I’m very fond of: dynamic shots and character poses are essential when drawing the character, so I love using him as an exercise to push my skills, and this was no exception. It took a few tries to decide how to configure the buildings, but eventually managed to have a shot with the buildings pointing at Spider-Man high up in the air, his black silhouette contrasting with the white sky.
I decided to scrap the civilians to keep the attention on Spider-Man, as well as to further push how high up he is. Making it all lineless was a challenge, especially as I hadn’t planned it from the beginning, but I think the final image makes it work very well. The end product reminds me a bit of the concept art for The Incredibles, which was all made in a 1950s graphic style.
After seeing how long it took to draw these two, I decided to draw the rest of the images on my phone, as it’s faster than using Harmony on my computer (which, for some reason, can be annoyingly slow).
My third thumbnail went back to the idea of a larger person, but this time in a different tone and setting; a mysterious giant sitting in a forest, looking at a human staring up at him.
Making the shading on the floor and the giant’s skin was a challenge, and it looked a bit weird after exporting it, but I think the end product looks fine. Adding some flying birds to show the giant’s size was a good last-minute addition.
I wanted the fourth thumbnail to have a more classic fantasy trope, so i drew a knight entering a huge castle door, with the shadows and lines all leading to his body, contrasting against the background.
It was very rough at first, but a bit of cleaning up made it look nice enough. There’s definitely still some clean-up to be done, however.
The fifth thumbnail went for a more abstract fantasy setting; a castle high up in the sky, on top of a bottomless pit surrounded by jagged spikes, all pointing up to it. A very random assortment of dangers, that I think work to give the scene a sense of threat.
Making the sun have some waves in the clean-up helps with the atmosphere, and having the spikes contrast against the floor makes them seem almost like a beast’s teeth, upping the creepiness.
Finally, I decided to end on something simple; a deep hole in the ground, with a mysterious beast at its end, shrouded in darkness.
The shading helps direct the eyes towards the beast, and not showing its body allows for more tension. I’m not too happy with how the human’s shadow came out, so I might retry this concept later down the line to improve on it.
Overall, this exercise was very fun: having to think of creative and varied shots was challenging but exciting, and getting them done (and having some even look good) was very rewarding. I think the first three are much better than the last three, so I know I have much to improve on, but it doesn’t change the fact this was a fun learning experience.
Cats and Dogs: Video Links
Proof of concept animation:
Animatic:
Final animation:
Final animation + subtitles
Cats and Dogs 3
After presenting our animatic and test animation, we received some helpful feedback from our tutors as well as the people at the Horniman: the most important takeaway was that we needed to firmly establish something within the artstyle to differentiate the scenes happening in the “real world” and the scenes inside the book. To do this, we decided on a few key differences between the two: the most noticeable was having the bedroom scenes drawn with a regular brush, whereas the book scenes would be drawn with Harmony’s charcoal brush, which gives lines a rougher style to them, and makes them look more like hand-drawn illustrations. We found this to be a great idea, as it establishes the book sections as being drawings even in the (already drawn) world of our animation, as well as giving it a very child-like feel.
Our second idea was simplifying the characters’ eyes in the book scenes: while the bedroom scenes show the kid and grandma having large, expressive eyes, the book scenes simplify them to dot-eyes, making them appear more simply-drawn while still retaining a cartoony nature to them. This change was even applied to the dogs, making for a small but noticeable design change.
And finally, we made sure to have the scenes in the book have more varied, brighter colour schemes than the limited colours we decided to use on the bedroom scenes (which we ended up deciding on after going through a few aesthetic color palettes). We made the room focus around reds, oranges and yellows, to give a warm and welcoming feel to the environment, as any kid’s bedroom should feel.
Another big change we made to the plot was the kid’s influence on the book: before, we were planning on only having him listen to the story, which would contain random humans along with the dogs (as shown in the animatic). But after a talk with Su-Lynn, we decided it would be more fun to have the kid brought inside the book and interacting with the dogs himself, thus overcoming his fear. It was a quick and easy change that greatly improved the feeling of our story.
With all that settled, and everyone’s frames decided on, we began fully working on the animation: I had the beginning and ending shots, as well as a shot with grandma entering the kid’s bedroom, and two dogs. I started by importing the animatic’s storyboards into Harmony, thus having some timing set already. Then came the rough movement and background, to make sure I had the characters’ animation and setting down before starting to clean them up. My first challenge was making the bedroom door open slowly enough to be mysterious, and also keeping it looking right with the forced perspective the shot was in. It took a few attempts, but I was eventually able to make it work.
Then I’d move on to cleaning up the movement, which was time-consuming but fairly easy. Finally, there came colouring, which was probably the most annoying part of the whole operation: Harmony is extremely finicky when it comes to what lines it does and doesn’t close, so for almost every frame, I would have to go and look for what small holes between lines I had previously missed to make sure it didn’t fill in wrong spaces. Once again, not really hard, but very time-consuming.
Still, the whole process was fairly smooth: I worked on the opening and ending shots first, then moved on to the dogs, and finally worked on the shot of the grandma entering the bedroom.
There were some highlights: remembering how to use nodes was very useful in having the husky dogs run across the screen without me having to manually drawn them in every single frame, as well as making a few scene transitions appear very smooth. And getting the lighting to look nice and realistic in the bedroom scenes was a challenge that I think ended up paying off, as I really like how it ended up looking.
I studied and imitated a lot of the characters’ movements in order to draw them as realistically as possible, and I think it really helped in some instances, like with the grandma sitting down and getting up from the bed.
When all the animation was done, we finally put the sound together, with both new and old sound effects, as well as a happy music that played over the book scenes.
All that’s left is the PDFs, and then this project will officially be over. Submitting the video to the Horniman was a huge relief, and I’m very proud of the work we managed to do. It pushed me to try new things I’m not quite used to doing in my work, and I’ll keep trying to experiment in my work moving forward.
Cats & Dogs 2
Me and my teammates presented our idea and it went well: they enjoyed our idea and the style we were going for. They also gave us some good advice to go off of, mainly to try and find a source of conflict in the story. Because of this, we went through a few iterations of the story, from the child loving dogs to not liking his grandma’s dog. Finally, we settled on an idea that gave a good plot while still being fairly understandable, and even relatable, to kids: the protagonist is simply afraid of his grandma’s dog, which leads her to teach him about how useful and nice dogs have been to humans through the years.
We quickly drew some thumbnails on Miro, and split them out between us as evenly as we could. We then worked on our storyboards individually; i tried making my boards detailed enough to show all the main movements the characters would take, but still simple enough to be drawn quickly and not look too detailed for an average storyboard.
To make sure we’d keep the designs proportionally and stylistically accurate throughout the project, we also made character sheets for all the characters. For my dogs, I tried drawing them in a way that would make them easily recognizable through their proportions and colours, while still making them “cartoony” and appealing to children, giving them large expressive eyes and basing their designs on simple shapes (which will also be useful when animating them).
We also needed an animation test, 5-10 seconds long, to properly show the style we’d be going for in the final project. we agreed I would do the detailed background and keyframes, Jahiem would do the inbetweens and Calix would colour it in. I did my part, but because of various technical problems we had, we were eventually forced to scrap it and make a simpler one from Jahiem’s computer. I still hold my original keyframes as exercise for the rest of the project; it helped me start better understanding the character designs, and it made me focus on keeping them proportionally accurate.
Once everyone finished their storyboard frames, they sent them to me: I compiled and timed them all together in a single animatic. Fitting everything in around 50 seconds was definitely a challenge, and we had to cut some small scenes to make it, but ultimately we managed to make it work.
We all collected various sound effects for the animations; my teammates sent them to me and I put them in to the best of my abilities. The sound is something we definitely need to work a lot more on, as the video currently sounds very empty: some calm and happy music in the background could be perfect, we just need to find a right tune.
Finally, we re-presented all out work to the people at the Horniman (as well as our tutors), in the form of another Canva presentation, showcasing our designs and the improvements we made thanks to their previous feedback.
https://www.canva.com/design/DAExHq1Qx18/Ov0DiMWGOK1vLzlXPLSTEg/edit
It went fairly well: they seemed to enjoy what we were making and gave us some good advice for us to work on, such as better showcasing the child’s fear of the dog, and separating the real world from the book through the artstyle (we already had plans to do that, but didn’t incorporate it into the animatic, so it was still useful to hear).
Now we have to do all the rest of the animation: in-betweens, coloring, finishing the sound effects and compiling everything together smoothly. It’s a lot to do, especially with everything else we have going on, but it’s doable, and I have faith in us and our project.
Informed Practice 2
The Monday morning lessons have kept being interesting, bringing in new guests each week and listening to their experiences. The latest guest, Rory WT, was particularly interesting to me, as his projects had an artstyle and direction closer to what I’d be interested in working on someday.
The afternoon lessons have been dedicated to understanding the work we have to do, and furthering our ideas and concepts. First, we had to pick a specific work to focus our essay on, that drives our idea forward. As I’m focusing on long-running franchises, and what they do to remain relevant for long periods of time, I decided to talk about my favorite animated movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It came out over 50 years after Spider-Man’s inception, and it prides itself of its series’ history through its use of characters, references, plot devices and more.
By thinking about its 5 Ws, the ways it proves and expands on my point, and finding four images that further show what I mean, I feel like I have a better understanding of what I’m trying to prove.
I’m not entirely clear on the literature review or the video essay yet, but I’ll try understanding and making progress in both of them.
Toolkit 1: Week 1 and 2
I decided to choose the 2D Animation toolkit as my first choice, as I’m hoping it will help me when animating my Horniman project. The first five weeks will be about the principles of animation, and so far we’ve covered timing/spacing and anticipation.
In the first toolkit, we were asked to animate a bouncing ball, a bat hitting a ball, and a ball dropping inside a gelatinous / watery substance. I was somewhat unprepared for the first toolkit, as my animation software was acting up, so my first works weren’t too good. Plus, the application wasn’t allowing me to export the animations.
For the second week, we practiced with timing, through people throwing balls and having hairs plucked out. This time I tried a different application, Flipaclip, and did a better job.
I still need to find a stable way of animating on my computer, as Harmony is giving me problems, but this has been a fun toolkit so far.