Story Animation

Another thing we did recently (before we learned about Maya, actually) was create our first story animation with After Effects. This was, by far, one of the biggest and most stressful things I've done in all of e-Comm so far, other than the big group projects we did last year, but I'm proud that I powered through and proud of my work.

Pre-Production

My storyboard

When our teacher first told us that we would be writing a short story, and then animating it, I had millions of ideas flying through my head. My main thought was that I wanted something cute. I remembered a spider that I had found in my bathroom several days prior, and how I had put them on a piece of paper, under a cup, and let him outside. I thought of what might have been going through the spider's mind, and what they thought when they got outside. I realize that spiders don't raise their offspring, but keeping with the "cute" theme, I thought up a small spider family, made up of a mother and child, living in a human's bathroom.

Production

Storyboarding for this was fun; I love spiders and I love drawing them. I really liked the way my designs looked on paper, but unfortunately my digital art skills aren't as good and they didn't translate well onto the computer. My story, however, was overshot. I set my standards a bit too high for myself and my abilities. I had to shorten and simplify my story once I hit production because of time limitations, which made me a bit upset, but what can I do when it's my first major project in my sophomore year of high school animation.

Trouble with After Effects

Finished baby spider design

Another bit that made creating this so stressful was working with After Effects. After Effects was easy for me to manage when I had a few different layers and such, but once you throw in more than one character, backgrounds with five plus layers, and multiple different scenes, things get troublesome. Once I had finished creating my backgrounds and characters, I needed to figure out a way to put it all together into a story, which was very overwhelming. Eventually, I calmed down and thought it through. The final project did eventually come out and I'm very proud of the work I've done for my first big project in this class.

Post-Production

After almost everyone else in class had finished their animations, we watched and critiqued each other. There were no harmful words towards each other, only what we liked, and thought needed work on our animations. I was told that mine was well done, though there were somethings that I needed to fix, such as some timing issues and objects that didn't fit the aesthetic of the rest of the animation. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get to any of these things since I had deadlines to meet.

Conclusion

I really wish I had set my standards lower for myself. That was probably the main cause of my stress, and the rushing of my project. I'm proud of myself for having overcome my stress and finishing the project, but I'm upset that I almost let the stress get to me. For our next big project I'll probably try to take things easier on myself and try to stay after and work on things at school.