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?)