Personal Project

Personal Project Review

The scope of this project originally was to create a story about a cat that has a dream that he saves the Royal Cat Gem of his kingdom by growing wings and diving off the cliff that the gem fell down. I later realized that it was going to be a lot harder than I thought to create a cat that could walk on two legs, so I decided to change the character to a worm mainly because I really enjoyed the wiggle worm project. I then thought that the idea of a worm trying to rescue a precious gem was a little to weird for the story so I

decided to create a new species. Enter the Dragonpiller, a half caterpillar half dragon species. Although I changed the story from its original point, the background and landscape I had imagined I kept for my Dragonpiller because they matched the story of the Dragonpiller. However transferring my Photoshop projects to After Effects caused a lot of problems and parts of my project were deleted multiple times, which resulted in me having to cut out some of the extra effects I wanted to originally add. One thing that I still am planning on going back and adding is a spout of fire that the Dragonpiller shoots out to help showcase the whole idea of it being half dragon instead of it just growing wings. One cool thing that I learned along the way is how to create a repeating falling background for one of the scenes in my project. There were a few times that I kind of forgot how to use the puppet pin tool, but luckily my friends were able to help me figure things out again. I would definitely have changed the color scheme of my Dragonpiller next time because the deep purple and bright yellow combination didn't really fit too well for me and I wish that I could've changed it before finishing the animation. I would keep the background, landscape, and the falling background the same because those things really worked well for me.I don't know if we are using After Effects again, but if we are I will remember to never change my Photoshop files once they have already been uploaded to After Effects because that will screw up your entire project. Overall though, I was pretty happy with the way it turned out, but there are definitely some things that I could fix and I hope to have a chance at fixing those in the near future.

Technical Tutorial

So today I am going to teach you how to make a repeating fall background in Adobe After Effects.

1.) First you create your background in Photoshop and set it to the desired dimensions for your project. 

2.) Next you have to import that file into After Effects as editable Photoshop layers.

3.) After that you have to copy and past the image three times in your composition and stack them on top of one another. After that you have to click and drag the spiral icons next to each image layer and then drag them to the layer you want to parent it to.

4.) After linking these layers to a parent function you have to create a node and link the layer that has the other layers attached to it to that node. After that you move the node with keyframes in the desired direction to get the repeating background effect.

If you did everything right, this should be what it looks like.

And there you have it! One repeating background for you.

Is 2d Animation Dying?

In this article, the author discusses briefly the history of 2d and 3d animation, how both these types of animations are used today, and how animators are becoming more common. The author agrees with the statement that 2d animation is dying. She says that 3d animation is more common because people like it more. With 3d animation you can better show emotions and movement without making look like plastic or wood. She also says that the only thing keeping 2d animation alive is TV, mainly because with 2d you can create more in less time while telling a good story. She is part of her own animation company called Optical Image and has numerous years of animating under her belt. She also references data collected in an article by Jeffrey Katzenberg to further support her argument. The author, Melanie Tauchmann, uses a variety of sources and her own company experience to make every claim she says, which is her main strength in the article. She is also very strong in addressing her arguments clearly an professionally. Another thing is that she does acknowledge the other side and does her best to present her side without completely bashing the other side. Although she has many strengths her one main weakness that all her paragraphs seemed to be very short and shallow. Overall the author says that 2d animation isn't as popular and is slowly losing ground to 3d animation. As someone who is has used 2d animation and a little bit with 3d animation I think these points are very well made and carry their own weight in how effective they are in describing the differences between the two styles of animation. The author's arguments do support the main claim because she explains how 3d animation nowadays is better and more common than 2d animation. After reading this article I felt like it reinforced my own opinion about 2d and 3d animation, but looking at this article from a neutral perspective it is very convincing. I can use this newfound knowledge to look for an available job in animation, as it's harder to get a 2d animation job than 3d animation. Overall I think this was a really well thought out argument and the author did a very good job at making her claim on the topic.
The Article: http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/features/creative-lifestyle/turf-war-is-2d-animation-dying/

More Masks

These were the photoshop masks that I made. I used more of a blur to create a better swinging affect on the girl. With the scuba I chose a more transparent part of the background to make it appear as though the word scuba is a reflection from the surface.

Shadow of a Can

For this project I made a shadow for the Sprite can to make it seem like a realistic object, but in reality it is only a 2d object with a shadow of the can to make it appear 3d.

Floating Mountain

In Photoshop we used a rock formation and clouds to create a scene that makes the rock formation appear to be floating. We also used other background images to add to the floating affect.

Logo

This is my custom logo. I chose a simple yet meaningful design. I used my initials as the center piece to create a feeling of friendliness along with incorporating my name into the logo. The initials are inside a circle as a sign of comfort and protection, because the logo would be used for a job in psychology. Speaking of psychology, the color yellow is a color of intellect and creativity which are two crucial parts of being a psychologist. Overall it's a nice cozy design and nothing too sore on the eyes, it turned out as well as I could've hoped for.

My process was to just use Illustrator and tweak shapes to see if they would look good in certain modes. The circle for instance, is actually a 3d circle shifted to look like an uneven circle. The text is also in 3d to add depth to the logo and make it match the circle.

Famous Logo Recreation

For my logo that I recreated, I wanted something with a simple look and design, but was easily recognizable. So I chose the Dominoes logo because of its simplistic look and newly remade logo.

The logo on the left is the original and the one on the right is the one I made with my custom wordmark. I simply made shapes that were scaled off the size of the original, and then I moved them into position using smart guides and transparent layers.

Painting in Photoshop

Painting in Photoshop is not an easy task to set up. You have to create a custom brush and style it to fit your needs. In my paintings I used the very wet, heavy load setting to mix my colors together. I also used the Dry setting to get some extra colors on the pallet to mix with the background. I made two separate paintings, one of a water spout over the ocean and another of an unnamed mountain. It was a simple task of mixing the colors and creating new styles until I was satisfied with the end result.