My first semester of being an animation student is over! So, I thought I’d share some of those animation finals that I handed in! I often referred to this semester as hell but honestly, I’m like... 78% proud of the work I’ve done and myself. It was a lot, and I mean a lot, of hard work but it paid off as I got the highest grades I’ve ever received… EVER! Without further ado, here are some of my finals.

1. Rotoscoping project done for my Animation 1 class (the first of three I had to do for this class, because you know nothing quite says it's finals week like a teacher giving you three projects at once). This project was Rotoscoping, which is basically tracing over live action film. In this project, I traced over the figure and the horizon line as required. We were also required to draw in an object; therefore, I drew in a laser gun in place of a right arm. The last requirement was ink and color which I kept to a duller color pallet to give an apocalyptic feel or “Mad Max” style. Luckily, sound was not required so I moved on to the other projects that were due! (side note: all hand drawn, aka the death of me)

2. Action Analysis project done for my Animation 1 class (the second of three due for this class). This project is like rotoscoping but a little different. Action Analysis was to trace over an existing cartoon with our own character. Our teacher provided us with some “Looney Tune” cartoons, except for one “Inside Out” clip that I picked for this project. It turned out to be longer than most of the others; kind of shot myself in the foot there, but I really like this movie! We weren’t required to make anything highly detailed and didn’t even have to do a background; just an original character with some color. So, as you can probably tell, I kept it basic in shape, line, and color.

3. Lip Sync project done for my Animation 1 class (the last project for this class). This last project I’m going to be honest… I did not care for it. Not because I didn’t like the idea but because I was crammed for time after those other two projects. So, I decided to keep mine cute and simple. For this project, we had to record two lines from a nursery rhyme then draw a head, shoulders, and mouths. We followed the mouth positions on the paper given to us by our teacher then cut them out so we could take a stop motion video later. Once I timed out the keyframes for each mouth positions to correlate with the sounds or words, I took the stop motion pictures. After throwing everything into Adobe Primere Pro, I realized my sound and video was a little off but after a few teaks it was done! However, that was just one class. There were still more finals to do.

4. Fire & Explosions project done for my Graphics & Moving Image class. For this project, we had to create fire and explosion effects! I used the “green screen” to video my roommate and I acting like gangsters while posing for some “Power Ranger” logic explosions. My roommate and I think Pokemon’s new “Team Skull” is hilariously stupid and love Power Rangers poses. With their ridiculous explosion logic behind it, this idea for my project was born (muhahaha)! In place of the green screen I used a picture I took (which caused some funny debate as my teacher refused to believe I took it and insisted it was from Google). The picture was black and white, which gave me the idea of only tinting my video into color during the explosions which worked out in the end since it made those parts really POP! Lastly, I had to add sound. Luckily our teacher told us about sounddogs.com, which helped provide this video with great sound effects.

5. Color Storyboard project done for my Storyboard & Storytelling class (this one 100% killed me). This project was a long development, and it went from script to storyboard to paper animatic to a finalized colored animatic/storyboard. This clip is only the first half of my story, as its about 30 seconds or so, and that was the minimal requirement, so I managed to finish that part in color. This project killed me because this first half refused to export! On top of that, I was sick most of the last two weeks feeling nauseous so I didn’t get to see my teacher about it until it was too late, the day of final class. We tried to export it in various ways and on different computers but unfortunately came to conclusion that I needed to redo the entire thing. Luckily, my teacher pitied me and felt bad that I was sick and had so much trouble with Adobe After Effects and exporting and granted me another week to redo it and send it to him. My first couple days of break were interrupted by completing this project, and I ran into some more problems here and there, but I made some improvises to make it happen. This is the final version and my final animation final, I hope you like it!