Presentation and Reflections

November 30th brought the capstone poster-board presentations in the Rams Den. I get anxiety I crowds of people, so I was nervous even before the event started. I had only finished my poster-board the night before and when other members of the class started showing up with hyper-colorful boards and glossy photography while mine remained black and white to keep my theme, I started to get even more nervous about my project, thinking that I had done something wrong or misinterpreted something I should have done.

We set up our boards and I had just finished plugging in my laptop and setting up my animatic when someone came up to my board - directly. They passed all the others and came to look at my project and that startled me because I had honestly expected my project to be over-looked by many people. This person viewed my graphic novel, occasionally glancing up at the board to read about the project, then watched the animatic. When it ended, she turned to me and said, "This is really powerful." It was that sentence that gave me the confidence that I had accomplished my goal for this project.

Throughout the evening, many people cam up to my board and asked questions and seemed very interested in the project. Some were attending because of an extra-credit opportunity for a class, some were simply passerby's. Regardless, a lot more people were genuinely interested than I had anticipated.

Taking a step back now and looking at my project and this semester, I know without a shadow of a doubt that there were times I could have pushed myself harder to create an even better product.But in the thick of everything else going on in a semester, the thought of doing any more than I had already done was overwhelming. Why is it that the projects we do for ourselves or the ones we are in charge of everything seem to be the ones that are harder to motivate ones self to work on?

This project has been a lot of work for me, and it has taken a lot out of me; I'm so grateful that it's done now! I am pleased with how it's turned out overall. I wanted to create something that would leave an impact on those who saw it, and I think I've accomplished that.

Graphic Novel and Animatic

The progression of my graphic novel started out slower than I would have liked. I had to work and re-work my page layouts a few times in order to make the story flow in the way I wanted. After some edits and overall approval from my director, I began art production. I started with my character designs. I took the simple characters I had developed for my animation and made them more complex. Then I took about two and a half weeks to draw out all the pages of the graphic novel. There are 17 pages of art with the cover re-using one of the images. I then started a rough cut of where I wanted the images to be in the animatic, and I started planning how I wanted them to move.

At the Capstone Faculty Review, I had my line art for the pages, but not the shading or the cover yet. I also somehow managed to forget to unplug my USB from where I was working at home (oh Mondays...), so I unfortunately could not show my professors the progress on the animatic. The faculty did give me some good advice on how to improve my graphic novel, and the next three weeks I spent making the changes suggested, finishing up my animatic, and putting together my poster-board for the presentations.

For my graphic novel, I made the borders of the pages black and developed the cover. I added in shading to make the images a bit more dynamic and give them some depth. Everything is in black, white, and gray because I didn't want colors to take the center stage in my project. I wanted the story to be powerful and I didn't want colors to detract from the message I tried to convey.

For my animatic, I was surprised at how difficult it was to find creative commons audio that would work with my setting. Audio recording and editing are things I am still not very good at, but I ended up recording the sounds of walking, the newspaper rustling, and a few others. The walking was so difficult because my microphone didn't want to pick up the sound very well, so it sounds more like tapping than footsteps. The people I shared it with agreed with me that the steps didn't sound quite right, but I ran out of time to try and fix it. I need to make friends with an audio person or two I guess.

Overall, production was fairly straightforward once I had a feasible project instead of attempting the impossible. The biggest challenge I had other than audio was really managing working on this project at the same time as numerous other projects for other classes.

Record of Cultural Activities

Cultural activities I attended Fall 2015


1. Frederick's Oktoberfest 2015

On Saturday, October 3rd, I and two of my friends attended the Oktoberfest in Frederick, Maryland, held at the Frederick county fair grounds. One of my friends had wanted to take me along for about three years now and I never had the opportunity to attend with her, but this year I was finally able to. In the main hall, they served traditional German foods such as bratwurst, wienerschnitzel, many other sausages, sauerkraut, kartoffelsalat, and dessert pastries such as strudel. They also held a yodeling contest ans had a traditional band to play polka music. I heard there was some traditional dancing as well, but at the time it occurred I and my friends were in a different hall. 

In the other buildings, there were booths set up like a fair where attendees could purchase various items. One of the halls was devoted entirely to watching sports on big screens they had set up. The hall that my group spent most of our time in was set up as half vendors and half seating area with a stage. There was a couple performing traditional German and Swiss mountain music which was quite fascinating. There was some dancing as well.

Overall, it was a good experience. I really enjoyed hearing the music and tasting the foods and taking in the festive atmosphere of the whole event.


2. Five Years of Commercial Type: It's Not Just About the Money. It's Not Just About the Art.

On Thursday, October 22nd, I attended a lecture given by Paul Barnes as part of the Baltimore Design Week 2015. My Typography teacher took a group of students and professors up to Baltimore to attend.

Paul Barnes works to create typefaces, and he began his lecture by explaining how he and his partner Christian Schwarz (also a typographer) began to develop typefaces together and eventually formed Commercial Type. It was interesting to hear the stories behind some of the typefaces they have developed, and situations with clients that have gone both well and not so well.

Paul said a few things that stood out to me. He said that when you choose a typeface for a design, you have to consider its past, it's "baggage." Everyone has seen typefaces in certain ways before, so if you choose a typeface that is most commonly used for, say, children's books, and try to use it to promote a research program at a University, more often than not people will not take the design - or event - seriously because of the type's background and common associations. Another thing he said that stood out to me was that "the first 90% of the work is 90% of the work, and the last 10% of the work is 90% of the work. I think this applies to far more than just typography as well. Every project that you do, both parts take the same amount of effort.

I learned a lot from this lecture and am glad I had the opportunity to attend. They also gave out booklets with samples of their typefaces to attendees.



3. The Secrets of Engaging Mail

On Thursday, October 29th, I attended a lecture by Trish Witkowski of foldfactory.com that was held by the Blue Ridge AIGA. Trish is well know as an expert on folds used in mailing design, as well as what tools designers can employ to get people to actually open the mail instead of trash it. She spent the greater portion of the lecture talking about the categories of design formatting that are frequently successful when employed; such things as mailing addresses that look hand-written, unique paper and color choice, placement of design on the packaging, and what one can see through the "window" of the envelope.

It was interesting to see the examples of her points on the slides, but I was a bit disappointed that she didn't bring any physical examples for us to look at.

There was a question asked in the Q&A session afterwards that seemed important to me. The question was "how important is the design really in mailing?" and the answer that Trish gave was that the most important parts are really making sure you find the right audience and having something of interest to offer those people. The design takes a "behind-the-scenes" role in mailing and packaging design. I thought this was important because I have often heard it said that the best video editing is the editing you don't see. It's best to support from behind the scenes and let the message take the center stage.


4. Masterworks Chorale

On November 14th, I performed with the Masterworks Chorale. The pieces we performed were "Missa Gaia (Earth Mass)" by Paul Winter, "Chichester Psalms" by Leonard Bernstein, and John Rutter's "Gloria."

Performance, I have found, is an experience very much like viewing a performance but from a different perspective. I am taking in the music just as the audience is, I simply have a different role to play than just observer.

It is always fascinating to me to see how even when performing the same music I've rehearsed for months, on the stage it feels brand new to me. I find myself more focused on the music and everything around me that is creating the performance. This performance was no different.



5. "Getting Away with Shit"

On November 23rd, during Thanksgiving break, my Typography teacher took myself, another professor, and a local AIGA member up to Pennsylvania to an AIGA lecture there. The designer giving the lecture was Timothy Goodman,  and his talk was called "Getting Away with Shit."

He briefly covered his background in design and moved on to talk about what he is most well known for: Sharpie hand-lettering. He said that he had been in a bit of a slump and so he tried something different and it turned out he was very good at it and enjoyed it, so he pursued that.

Tim laid out six things that we should keep in mind as designers (and creative people). The six things are:

• Know the rules
• Have some audacity
• Don't ask for permission
• Listen to yourself/your gut instinct
• Put yourself into your work
• be young and stay young

I thought that these points stood out because really if we follow these points, great works will follow. Not immediately because nothing is ever immediate, but with patience, great work will be made.

Limits

Something I have had to realize this week as I work on my capstone and other school projects is that there are limits to what I can and cannot do. I don't like that. My personality makes me an optimist who thinks I can accomplish everything and anything I put my mind to, when in actuality I can only accomplish so much. 

This week I learned my limits. I realized that sometimes having too much ambition can be just as bad as having too little ambition, and that understanding concepts about how something is done is completely different from actually being able to do that thing. I came to the realization that while I understand the process of how an animation is done and the key concepts of making animation, I lack the experience to accomplish my task. I emailed my director as soon as I realized that pursuing the animation with as little experience as I have would be comparable to a child navigating a tour bus through New York City in rush our - not necessarily impossible, but certainly not likely. 

So, instead of trying to do an animation, my project is changing. I will be taking the story from my animation and make a graphic novel that doubles as a storyboard for what the animation would be. I will still be looking at the nonverbal communication aspect because still images communicate wordlessly just as well as wordless animation does.

Since I already have my storyboard and basic character designs, I just need to adapt my characters and adjust my schedule and I will be able to start art production on the graphic novel within the next day or so.

1st Week of Animation?

This past Monday, I talked with my capstone director about my blog posts because it's an aspect that I have been struggling with. I may have interpreted the directions incorrectly- I thought that the blog posts were meant strictly for research that we (the students) are doing alongside and for our projects, but after talking with my director I think that the purpose is also to follow my progress through my project. So, in my blog posts (starting with this one), I will try to also include my progress with my project and other related topics if appropriate. In this post, I'm including my final storyboard and the character sheets for my three characters. My style is decidedly simple because of the time constraint as well as my inexperience in animation. Hopefully next week I will be able to include a clip of animation to show my progress.

In my blog post last week, I talked about the two software that I was looking at. After looking at them again this week, I decided to use ToonBoom Harmony because it seems to be more what I am looking for for my project, and also if I can master it I can use the program for the work I do at my job as well. (Flipbook didn't have any of the features that I can apply to my work.) So I downloaded the trial version of ToonBoom Harmony to try out. There is a bit of a learning curve, but I guess due to how many creative software I have used, it was fairly intuitive for me. There are, of course, things that I still need to look up.

I had planned for this week to be the first week of art production (hence getting the software to try out), however, my animation project was delayed this week due to projects in my other classes being due in succession this week. I had planned this as the first of four weeks for animation, but seeing as I was unable to progress as much as I should have this week, I now have only three weeks to animate my entire short. There are 13 shots of varying lengths to finish, but they are all fairly short in length, so I still think it's feasible. I have an extra week after these three for editing everything together, and that's really what I'm good at, so if I run over schedule in production, I can make up time in editing. Believing it's possible is half the battle, right?

Also, this week I watched "Akira," the 1988 Japanese "landmark" animation. It's been brought up several times in multiple books I'm reading right now about animation, and many articles I've read online always list it as one of the best Japanese animations that everyone should see (at least everyone who can stomach it). Japanese animation has been a very big influence on my project, so I decided that I should finally watch it. (I'm calling it research. That's okay, right?)

Software Research

When I was in my teens and the Nintendo 3DS had just come out, by brother bought one and let me play with it. There was an animation application he had on it that absolutely fascinated me-Flipnote Studio. I spent hours making animations of eggs frying and rain falling and people blinking with that program. I didn't realize it at the time, but what I was creating was very amateur hand-drawn animation.

For my capstone animation, I've really had to think about how I want to produce the artwork. I've never had an actual animation class, but I've had a good amount of experience with art, design, and film. However, not having a class in animation means that I don't know what software is or isn't effective. With art production begining in the coming week, I've had to do some research about animation software (specifically for 2D).

The two professional level software that continuously came up in my research as being reliable and trusted by professional companies and individual animators were Toon Boom Harmony and DigiCel FlipBook. (Another one that came up a lot was Anime Studio Pro, but that program does not let you animate frame-by-frame which is what I am doing with my animation.) Comparing the two programs, for 2D animation they both seem to be able to work effectively and do basically the same things. Both have a free trial as well, and I am considering trying both in the coming week to compare the work flow and see if I could use one for my own animation. 

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More about Harmony
More about FlipBook

Hand-drawn Animation: What's its place?

Many people believe that hand-drawn, or 2D, animation is a dying art form. Hand-drawn animation takes so much more time and resources to make than CG animation does. (1) CG animation is also becoming more expressive and developed, and animators are actively seeking to push the limits to create new things.

However, maybe I'm a bit of an idealist for thinking this way but there is a certain quality to hand-drawn animation that cannot be re-created in CG animation. It has it's own language that speaks to the viewer in a specific way. I feel that CG and hand-done animation are two different ways of viewing something, and even if that thing is the same, the meaning is different for each.

I read an interview with Tomm Moore, creator of "The Secret of Kells" (an animation that has stuck in my head since I viewed it a few years ago) and "Song of the Sea." In the interview, he was talking about how CG animation tries to create something as closely to live-action as possible, whereas hand-drawn animation can be so simplified as to be not specific, allowing the viewers "to project themselves into [the film] in a more visceral way." (2) He also talked about the power that animation can have during childhood and stated that though he watches many movies as an adult, the ones that stay with him are the ones he saw as a child.

Many of the articles I read this week spoke of how hand-drawn animation now has the opportunity to evolve as an art form, to become something more than it is now. With newer technologies, the opportunities are essentially endless, all it takes is time and devotion. While it may not become mainstream or industry standard, I believe that hand-drawn animation still holds an important place in the world, and that it still has so much more to offer.

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(1) The Animation Guild
(2) Cartoon Brew