Animated Life Lessons

P1T9 Student Enter Game from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

For our new project we are doing animation. My teammates are Arianna and Raghav. We are doing an animation about students entering the internet, or entering a game they created. The goal is to try to escape while their other friend doesn't know it's them playing the game. Raghav is the friend playing the game and Arianna and I are the ones in the game. The personal character trait I feel we are most exaggerating in this animation is procrastination. The character traits Arianna has, and the ones we will be exaggerating, is her leadership and her attempt to work hard.

This time around I don't think we were really aiming for humor. Although we did add some funny parts. For example, I tried to keep the theme of Raghav crying. In the story he was supposed to feel left out and sad, so I thought 'what shows sadness? Crying!' We also tried to make it funny by using expressions in our voices. Like, Raghav at the very end said "What the heck that was actually you guys?" Except his voice sounded almost expressionless.


Considering we have never worked together I would say we did…Okay. Our level of productivity was not very good. We were the last ones to get our script approved, but we still needed to make adjustments. We also cut it pretty close to the wire, by finishing our scenes on the day our project was due. One of our teammates was out during the two days we had to animate. Overall it was a lot of stress. Although the best moment we had would be when we finished it and we could sit back, relax and submit it. Sorry I don't have any behind the scenes pics, I was more focused on turning in the project, after all a 3/4 on my blog is better than a 0/4 for our animation.

Character Development

For our new project we have to animate ourselves in a GIF. To do this we have to exaggerate some personal traits we have and what type of person we are. For example if you are usually a loud person you can exaggerate that by making yourself a lot louder than everyone else. Personally I think I'm a type a person that follows the crowd. I usually don't go off on my own, I always try to work with people I know. I am also a quiet person, which means I usually don't talk to other people other than my friends. Since becoming a teenager I have also found I am a genuinely lazy person. I have become a pretty big procrastinator, but I'm trying to get out of that habit.

The character traits I plan to exaggerate in my animation are my laziness and my quietness. I'm going to exaggerate my laziness by showing myself on a couch. I am going to exaggerate my quietness by showing myself walking through a hallway and making no noise. Although I won't be making any noise the hallway around me is going to make lots of noise. For example, If I open a door the hinges are going to squeak louder than they usually do. To do this I will make foley of a door opening, then raise the volume bar in iMovie. I know this is the same paragraph where I said what I would do for my animation, but apparently I didn't get to it. Just a showcase of my laziness... No just kidding. I actually didn't get to it, I didn't have enough time. Sorry!

They way we made our .GIF's are by first taking pictures of ourselves from the front, back and side (we didn't take the pictures though, our teacher did). Then we used photoshop to quick select our bodies and cut it out from the background. Next, we took our bodies that we cut out and put it into one photoshop layer and put it into animation mode. Once we have our bodies moving through the screen we can use the puppet warp tool which allows you to move any part of a picture that you want. Animating is a very annoying and slow process, since you have to go frame by frame, so I don't like it very much.