Kyle Mungenast's UTampa Animation 1 Blog

For the walk cycle project, I used the character Samus from the video game trilogy "Metroid Prime".  Her suit has many different parts and joints, thus I had to create many different symbols to create the puppet rig. I began with some rough sketches of the character; once I made the sketches, I was able to color it in and start rigging the puppet. Samus is on a mission in this walk; her fist is tense and despite the wintry cold surrounding her, she is keeping a consistent and focused pace to show her determination. I created the Samus puppet rig in Adobe Animate, along with the backdrop.  I added the snow in Adobe After Effects to add to the frosty planet setting.  I then did some compositing in After Effects; I imported the backdrop as an image and added key frames to change the position to make the background move instead of Samus, but creating the allusion that Samus is walking across the bridge.  I had to add the snow, too, since I just love the look of snow

For the kinetic typography project, I knew right away I was going to choose a song from my favorite band: Mastodon.  Their unique progressive metal sound inspires images and themes into my head every time I listen to them, so I knew I would have a blast animating lyrics to coincide with one of their songs.  For this project I also got to create an Animatic Story Board, something I had never done before which was actually very helpful for focusing my vision for the project. Here are both the animatic and final product! Animating the first 30 seconds of the 13 minute long epic "The Last Baron" was very interesting; the further I got along with the project, the more comfortable I became with After Effects, and the more I decided to challenge myself with the program.  Making the lyric "ablaze" spin after a musical tension release was among the most enjoyable moments of the project, and I also had a lot of fun playing with the blur effect on the repeated and m