Practice Makes Perfect

This project was done in my Introduction to Animation class. For this project, we were to make a 2D animation of our choosing. The only requirement was that everything was to be edited using Adobe After Effects to generate our final product. My choice was to go with traditional animation where you draw the movements and such on separate pages.

I'm not particularly a great artist but I thought to experience animation, I should experience animation, which I believe, in it's earliest form and that's frame by frame drawings. I didn't have the drawing board with the begs for this assignment so I had to draw everything out as close as I can to the page before. I basically just used basic tracing paper that you can get from your local art store. Nothing too fancy or complicated.

The drawing process took quite a bit of time. I had to draw quite a bit more than I thought I needed. Once everything was drawn out, I scanned every image I had and then used Adobe Photoshop to crop, resize, and some image tweaking to make the pencil drawings more clear. After that, it was import everything into After Effects and start rearranging the files and produce the animation I wanted.

I also want to give a special thanks to my friend, Drew Bingham, for helping me out with the project. During this assignment, I didn't have my Adobe Suite on my computer as I had lost my copy of it so until I could get a new copy, Drew was kind enough to allow me use his computer for this project. I definitely felt bad for bothering him during the project but I live quite a ways from my university so I had to do what was best for the situation I was in. On top of letting me use his computer, he also helped me out doing some of the Photoshop work as well, which I'm really grateful for. He's an undergraduate graphic designer at Weber State University so if he had something to say about Photoshop, I wasn't going to argue with him and listen.

It isn't the greatest animation but it was still a fun one for me to experience traditional animation at its earliest form. I can say that it's probably the most difficult thing to do. It makes me realize just how much we take technology for granted and also just how far animation has evolved.