Thursday, May 15, 2014

The End of Junior Year

Hello, I'm back. Its been awhile since I last blogged. I began a new project in late march after my teacher had shown me some of the animations by Saul Bass. I watched a lot of his works over a period of a week to get used to his style, so my project would look in sync and not have styles all over the place like my previous project.

I really liked the hand drawn and shape aspects he brought to his animations and openers since it gives each part of the animation a different look, but yet it all goes together nicely in the project. 





At the time, the AMC show the Walking Dead was entering its season finale, so I thought it would be a good idea to do an opener for the show in Saul Bass' style, since it gives it a eery and hand drawn feeling. It is rough on the edges such as the show makes the viewers get on the edge of their seats.  



It took me about two weeks to make the entire project. Each image was made with the vertex tool in Photoshop. Red was  the color of choice in this piece, which gave each character/ actor a different perspective. 




I also used the original Hitchcock font that Saul Bass used in most of his creations, so it would tie the piece in nicely. I used the Walking Dead font for the title because it was the shows original font used in the opener. 



This project was a smaller project since I had just finished my three month long project that received fourth place at the eMagine Media Festival. I felt that I needed to keep working, but also needed to take a little break and actually get out of school at 3:00 instead of 8:00 or 9:00. 








Here is the final product. (Chad is my Step dad btw.) 













I started my next project in the beginning of April when I began watching the show Supernatural. I was going to do an opener for the show in both my style and Saul Bass' style mixed together, so it didn't seem like I was stealing his style. The portraits for the show took me about three weeks just to make, since I was creating them from individual vertexes. For all the portraits, I used only black and white mixed colors, so that it all fit together and the colors would pop from the red background. 

The license plate was really fun to make because, living in Kansas you never really pay attention to how much detail had been put into our license plates. It was fun to make it in a more cartoon style, but still having it being sophisticated. I also love the color of blue I used in the background of the license plate, because   it made it pop and catch the eyes of the people viewing it. 
Sam's (on the right) portrait was one of the easiest, and yes he is a he. A lot of people thought that the portrait made him look like a woman, I honestly thought it looked like a young  Sigourney Weaver (Alien, Ghostbusters, Avatar.) By removing a mole and some of the depth in his face, he looks less "girly". This portrait only took me around an hour to draw. 
Dean (on the left) was the hardest portrait because the actor that plays his character (Jensen Ackles) had no "straight forward" pictures. I did Deans portrait around five times until I finally decided to use this one (top). Dean's portraits took me around two weeks to make perfect and choose which one I wanted to use. 













Castiel (Right) was another hard portrait to do because none of the pictures cut off the top of his head or would not show his body. He is my favorite character, so I wanted to make him look really good. His portrait took me around three hours to make it 100% perfect. 






John (left) was my final human portrait for this project. He was very hard to draw with vertexes because of the different volumes in his hair, since his hair in the photo I was going off of was black, I had to add the gray . His teeth were also very difficult. His hair took me an hour and a half to do and his face took me an hour to do. 







The 1967 Chevy Impala is the "icon" of this show, so I knew I had to include it in the project. The tires were the hardest part of this part because the tires should be completely round, but vertexes make that very difficult.  It took me around two hours to draw the car. In my project, it is never fully animated because the work caught up to me and I could not do it. 







This is my favorite drawing that I did. It is the front of the Impala and is currently hanging in my car collecting grandpa's basement. This was the most detailed drawing I did for the animation, even the Chevrolet logo was done with individual vertexes in a separate layer and shrunk down to give it better authenticity. This drawing took me around three hours to get it to its best quality. 





Two weeks after the portraits were done, I tried putting them into the opener sequence I had planned out, but I honestly hated the way the project was looking and stopped. It is my first unfinished work in this class, and I hope for it to be my last. 





My final project for the year is a Kinetic typography of different scenes from the show Supernatural. I have worked on this project for about a month, and it's been a really fun project. I think the hardest part of this project was just putting all the quotes together in a smooth functioning way. There aren't very many screen shots I could take for this one, so I am just going to put the render of what I have so far below. 










This year has been by far my most successful year in animation, I have chosen animation to become my future career and life style. I hope to do more projects over the summer, and will blog them. Thanks so much!

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Animation Update

Hey guys, I just wanted to update you on how my project turned out in the eMagine Media Awards. I had recieved fourth place. I feel that I could have executed the project a lot better, and that I didn't deserve first place because there were minor details that I knew I needed to fix, but didn't fix them. I feel very disappointed because I wanted this project to look the best for my dad's friend who had passed away only a last week. I hope my next animation is more successful, and I execute my animation methods better. 

Monday, March 24, 2014

Final Post

Well, here it is, the finish line. This was one of the hardest projects of my high school career, and they are going to get harder. This project tested me mentally and phisically, but I made it through. My dad's friend with cancer only has around a day left to live, and is currently not conscience or eating, he was the real push for me with this project. In the begining, I was working really hard on my project for that initial cause, then in the middle I kind of forgot what I was initially doing the project for, which was when the frustration and sloppiness was bothering me the most. It wasn't until the end that I remembered what I was really doing this for, not to place at eMagine, not to win a Pixel (but that would be nice) but for my dad's friend, to show him, that he is not alone, that everyone is with him.

 

Drawing has never been my greatest skill, and I know what you're thinking right now, "she's an animator, but she can't draw!?" Yes I am currently working on my drawing skills, and they will improve over time, but the skills I have now are the only skills I had for that project. The begining part with the sun coming up, was one of my older Photoshop portraits I had done last year, and I drew the heaven scene in class one day, these were the prettiest scenes in the whole animation according to some, and I am really proud of that since my drawing skills are not all the way up to par. (Below is a picture of my storyboard, even though you may not understand what is going on in it, I do and I followed it pretty well for how many times it needed to be changed.) 














The only negative to how the project turned out was how I incorporated optical flares for a full minute of the animation instead of the classic hand drawn I had started with. Both my parents and my teacher said the same thing, but it was too late for me to change that much in my animation. 





I have shown my final animation to a lot of people, and have gotten nothing but positive comments towards it. This is the hardest animation project I have ever done, and I hope they keep getting harder and harder. 

Here is the link to my final animation: 
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93TDgjgMkC4

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Title Page

A few days ago I had made a quick title page for my animation, it didn't look too good. I feel that this maybe one of the hardest part of my animation because I have no song to go off of. I need to figure this out today, other than that my animation is done!

Monday, March 10, 2014

Reactions

Well, here it is, the final week to work on this animation project. I rendered out what I had so far on last weeks blog, and decided to share it with my friends and family and get their feed back, and it was phenomenal. My family members enjoyed it and one of them actually began crying because they thought it was so beautiful. I hope my hard work and efforts are shown in this project, I have put in a lot of hours on this, and hope to be rewarded for it.  It is currently making its way around my dad's friends family (Read Blog "My Purpose") and they are so thankful for the time and thought I have given to this project, for my dad's friend. I hope to hear my dad's friend's reaction to the animation. Thank you all for your support.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

I can see the finish line!

Sorry it has been so long since I blogged last. We had yet another snow day, which put me behind. I have had a lot of difficulty the past few weeks, just trying to re storyboard certain scenes of my animation.The difficulty of this project is unbelievable, but it has been completely worth it. It is hard to believe that I really began this project a little over three months ago. I felt relief watching the whole thing (unedited) and actually began to cry at the end because of how hard I have worked on this. I know that my friends and family are proud of as well as the judges of our up coming competition, but I also hope my teacher sees how much effort and life I have given to my animation. I hope to inspire other animators. Thank you so much for your support.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkSluat7ur4&feature=youtu.be

Monday, February 24, 2014

Dragons Are Not Fun

Well, last time I checked in, I was having trouble with After Effects FX, and last Friday I think I may have completely overloaded the After Effects program with the size of the file. Once again today my original storyboard idea did not work out, so I had to go back and re story board a certain part of my animation. This project has become an obsessive hobby and I hope to make my animations look better and better. Here is the test render of my animation, I had to put it in a lower quality to have it render out properly. The last few frames have not been completely edited yet, but should be done tomorrow. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcUGoClU5uI&feature=youtu.be