Project #3: Kinetic Typography

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 muffled lyric "please".

The most challenging parts of the project were creating a path mask with the pen tool; problem solving in moments like these helped me grow more comfortable with Adobe After Effects.

I also used Adobe Animate to draw the backgrounds which are inspired by multiple Mastodon album covers, and I used a bit of frame by frame animation within Adobe Animate as well with the Leviathan animation near the end of the clip circling around the creature. Combing the two programs was most enjoyable because now I feel comfortable with the two and had a great time creating this animation. Looking forward to the puppet walk!

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Project #4: Walk Cycle

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 loo...

Project #2: Weight

The weight project was a lot of fun; I have grown to especially enjoy working with the Adobe Animate program! For this project I chose to have a scene with Star Wars characters C3P0 and R2-D2; C3P0 has to lift R2. I began with a ruff outline before I drew the character of C3P0: Some of the challenges included animating the character's knees to show weight and making sure the weight of the object stays constant the whole time. Frame by frame got a bit challenging here, especially when it came to consistency in the volumes. It was also a bit of a challenge not having the rotoscope to trace; that was a help with volume control since I was tracing real actors, but this time I had to really keep track of the onion skinning tool and make sure they stayed consistent. Using reference footage was fun, too! It was a great project and I definitely feel a lot more comfortable with Adobe Animate.

Assignment #2: Bouncing Ball with Obstacle

The bouncing ball with obstacle was a great first project which started getting me used to flash and excited for animation class. The obstacle I chose was the factory from the album cover of Pink Floyd's "Animals", and for the bouncing ball, I struggled at first with the size changing throughout the animation, but took on the challenge and found some solutions to work through it.

Kyle Mungenast's UTampa Animation 1 Blog

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