My Animation Journey

For the final project we were required to create an animation of a character's dialogue. I was super excited to start this project as I've always wanted to animate my characters talking (as silly as that may seem), so I chose to animate one of my original characters named Siege. At the last moment I decided to give him a completely new hairstyle, so I had to kind of wing his hair haha. For references I looked up male arms, and I also used my own hands as reference (for when he lifts his hand up and points a finger gun). The audio I used was from a clip of a "Behind the Scenes" video of the voice actors of Legend of Korra, and the person speaking is Mako's voice actor, David Faustino. I think out of all of the projects I had to create for this class, this one is definitely my favorite. Even though I didn't have enough time to finish the animation, create a second pass with cleaner lines and smoother animation, etc, I still love how this project came out as it r...

As someone who had prior experience creating a simple arm puppet in After Effects, I was excited to learn how to make a more complex one in Toon Boom. I decided to create a puppet of one of my original characters holding a gun and sort of going crazy. Going into this project was a bit overwhelming at first, since I had to upgrade to Harmony premium and had no experience with the node view. Creating the puppet itself was fun, and since this was the first time I added color to an animation, this helped me get used to the stroke tool. Honestly, learning how to add pegs and learning how to understand the node view took a bit of time, but I eventually got the hang of it. Adding key frames and ease was probably the easiest part since I have lots of keyframe / graph editing experience in After Effects, and it was relatively the same (if not easier) to do in Harmony. Overall, I feel like making puppets can make simple movements easier for simple characters / objects, but for things that I like...

 For this project, we were required to create a walk cycle of any character. Excitedly, I chose one of my favorite original characters to create a walk cycle for. This project was honestly much harder to start than I was expecting it to be- just making the key poses were hard! It was challenging to do the sketch layer and figure out the timing for the different parts, but once I got that done and over with, the rest went pretty smoothly (since I could just copy, paste, and clean each body part. I think it would have been easier for me to create a puppet for this so that all of the different body parts could stay together without me having to move / adjust each part for each frame. But aside from the tiny mistakes (that I'll definitely clean up over winter break), this is definitely my favorite project that I've done (mostly because I love my character haha).

 This project was definitely the longest project to animate by far. I needed to record a video of myself to use as a reference, so having a reference made the process much easier. I was extremely nit-picky with volume control and keeping the lines clean, and looking back at the finished product, I can definitely see where timing could be improved. But overall, I'm kind of happy with how this came out due to how long it took to make it hehe

I was super excited for this project as this was the first one where we were officially required to use a character. Unfortunately (again due to time constraints), I'm not too proud of the outcome of this as I had to really simplify things, but here's the finished product :) *Character is just some random boy*

For our third project, we were required to animate a flour sac. Unfortunately due to the limited time I had to work on this project (due to my other classes) I wasn't proud of the outcome, so I won't be posting it on this blog. However, here's the flour sac artwork I created to practice flow, balance, etc!