For my passion project I decided to learn about animation and how to get started. I have always had a passion for animation. Whether it was through watching my favorite little kids shows, or the desire to want to create my own animation. A few years ago I discovered that I could draw characters from Disney animated movies. When I heard about the passion project I took this opportunity to finally begin my process of getting started in animation. Since animation takes such a long time, I planned to just research during the time given to allow myself to discover more and more about animation as I go. Once I felt confident in my understanding of animation, I planned to then began putting together short animations that demonstrated what I learned and also demonstrated what is possible for a beginner. This project wasn’t just for me, because I wanted to learn about animation. I was also using this project to help other beginner animators. When you think about how to get started on an animation it can be overwhelming. There are so many different components to animation, it may hold people back. By digging into programs as well as different terms that are used in animation I could then write a guide for my viewers. My hope is this will give beginner animators confidence and inspire them to begin their own animations.
Looking back at my project and what part of my project I am most proud of it is my stick-man animation. The process of learning how an animation works, as well as having to learn how a program will work takes a lot of researching and time. When I was able to gather enough information about how to begin an animation, how to add union layers, how to create frames, etc, I was able to go through a process based off of a tutorial and create a stick-man animation. When creating my stick-man animation I ran into a few challenges. For instance, when I first wanted to begin this project I needed to download the program Adobe Animate CC. Since all the computers at home, are my families and I don’t have a computer of my own I need to rent a computer from school. With the computers at the school, there are many restrictions on them, that didn’t allow me to download the necessary program. I was really proud how I handled this situation though. I was able to find a Khan Academy program that walked me through animating in the ways of Pixar. At home I was then able to work on this project and ended up with a strong animation that looks realistic enough for a beginner animation.
I experienced many different challenges when trying to animate for my final product. The first problem that I ran into I explained in the previous paragraph. This was when I was trying to download the program Adobe Animate CC onto my computer and it wouldn’t download due to restrictions on my computer. Instead of getting frustrated and stopping working, or dropping the project all together I contacted my Dad to confirm that we have the program at home on his work computer. Sure enough, we did have the program. I now had a plan I would continue with by hand-drawing animation as well as taking Khan Academy assignments and understanding how Pixar does their animation. Then at home, I would create the animation. I had my plan set and started do Pixar work. When I came across the hand-drawing plan I realized that a light board would be needed because you are then able to demonstrate union layers by placing each paper upon one another creating union layers. At school, though I did not have my light board, and my light board was too big to actually bring to school. I wasn’t going to give up now, I decided I would also start creating my other animation at home. I thought that having both a digital and hand-drawn animation was very important because I would be able to experience both difficulties as well as truly experience the animating adventure. At school, I was watching videos about how Disney does their animation and was writing notes and diving deeper to understand my knowledge about animation. Yes, there were a few challenges that popped up, but I was able to push past these challenges to continue my research and full understanding of animation.
Adobe Animate CC Animation
Below I created an animation based off of the Adobe Animate CC tutorials. Due to time, I was not able to add in affects and make it as realistic as I can, I hope to continue my progress on this animation in the future though.
Hand-Drawn Animation
Here I took the time to create small animations that were hand-drawn. The flip book animation is about 30 pages long, where as the jumping man is only 10 pages. Each of these were very experimental, I took this time to work on it so I could get use to drawing with no union layers.
Papergirl Animation
I took the time to study this short film and understand how they created it as well as tried creating a small animation of myself based off of their video.
Bouncy Ball Animation
In this khan academy lesson I learned about the way to give an object like a bouncy ball emotion. I also learned how to give an effective animation with multiple frames. You will see below that because my bouncy ball looks so realistic is because I stretch it too far during some frames compared to others.
For those of you who would like to try this khan academy assignment out:
Below is the coding for the hair simulations. This khan academy lesson was really enjoyable and helped me understand the difficulties but enjoyments of animation. It was really cool to see that coding can save you from having to redraw continually, but it also showed me that a deep understand of coding and computer programming is needed to be an animator. To have a good animated outcome coding is the way to go.
For those of you who would like to try this khan academy assignment out:
These videos are helping you understand Adobe Animate CC and guide you through creating a small animation yourself.
The videos below are examples of hand-drawn animations used with a light board.
The videos below are focused on how Disney animators created facial effects and hair effects on each of their characters. Watching their process even through a quick two minute video is very interesting and helps you see what steps you will be taking in the future.
These videos are a progression reel, where you see the progression of each movies animation. Each animation starts out drawn then as it continues with more detail 2D figures begin making their way to the screen.