End of Year Reflection 2016

This year in e-Communications was one year of learning, minimal progress, and at many times frustration. I ran into many problems over this last school year and I have now learned from them.

My year started off great with a tutorial from instructor on how to use the Motion Path in Maya. We created a fish in Maya and animated it swimming. Sadly my Maya folder corrupted and I lost my fish and the animation because I had not fully rendered out my fish. I then learned to make multiple copies of a project so I don't loose a lot of data. Data that I didn't lose from the fish was it's original sketched design. 

After my fish I started to work on my own personal project which was modeling a dragon. Oh boy was that dragon "fun". If you have read my previous blog about my poor failure of a dragon you will know that my dragon is still not completed due to my complete lack of planning and knowing what exactly I wanted to make. I have now realized that I need to make a clear and better plan before diving straight into animating. My mistake with my dragon was that I was so eager to animate I didn't properly plan out how exactly I was going to make it happen. I only got about halfway done because I got so frustrated with what I was doing. I have temporarily given up on that dragon.

If there is one thing I've learned from this year is that: YOU.MUST.PLAN.

Trust me if you actually plan out what you want to do before you start you will be a lot better off. It's easier to start and easier to imagine what you want to create. I actually planned for my next animation which is turning out great so far. 

After Semester 1 I was given an assignment to make a stop-motion animation with a group.  my group was made up of five people including myself. Our animation was "A Beary Bad Day". We got a giant bag of gummy bears and lots of other kinds of candying made a little candy village. We then took stop motion pictures of our little gummy actors. "A Beary Bad Day" actually won second place at E-magine and we were all extremely happy to have won anything at all. 

Later in Semester 2 I started on my 2D animation "Dream" which is still being animated but is going great so far. I planned and storyboarded it and I am currently making all my characters and the backgrounds. My hopes are that I will be able to finish this animation over the summer. 

As my Junior year of animation wraps up I am happy to say I have learned a lot this year and I am looking forward to my Senior year next year. I hope anyone reading this has a great summer!

2-D Project Progress

For my next personal project I'm taking a step back from 3-D animation to work on a little 2-D. The title of this animation is Dream. It's about a young girls dream of what she wishes her life was. 

To start my process I story boarded what exactly I wanted to happen, as seen below.

After I finished story boarding I started making my characters in Adobe Illustrator. I had to use a lot of refrences to get the basic human shape down but I finally created my first character, Kara and then after her I made her family whom i'm still in the process of making.

This is Kara who will be my animations protagonist.

Below are Kara's parents and her aunt. Her aunt may be aded to the story I'm not sure yet. I will be making the other characters soon.

While I was working on on making my characters my animation teacher asked for those of us in his class to make a poster of an animation we made or are making so I paused my animation for a short time to make this poster. 

I will make an update post once I actually start animating all my characters! Until then  enjoy my lovely poster.