My Animation Journey

Overall, taking this class is something I truly enjoyed. So many negative things happened this semester that affected me in negative ways, and the immense amount of workload I had for school only added so much stress. But I can honestly say that working on the projects for this class never stressed me out, in fact working on my animations made me happy. Even when I'd end up pulling all-nighters to complete my animations, the projects never felt like work since I loved what I was doing and I was so passionate about it. This class was definitely my favorite class and I'm grateful to have had such great peers and a great professor. This class made me realize that 2D animation (preferably character animation) is something that I'd absolutely love to pursue as a career, and it's something that I really think will bring me happiness in the future. This winter break, I'm going to create as many animations as I can to hopefully improve my animation skills and to get even mo...

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...