Intro to Animation

As mentioned in the Introduction page, this Google site existed initially as the final project for my Intro to Animation course I took in Spring 2020 at California State University, Long Beach. The professor was great, but my learning was mitigated by COVID and my inherent laziness. Even then, I still struggled to the general principles of animation.

To start, these animation assignments were done as the class began with traditional animation. These were basic animation exercises, as we learned the 12 principles of animation: Squash & Stretch, Anticipation, Staging, Straight Ahead Action Pose-to-Pose, Follow Through & Overlapping Action, Slow In & Slow Out, Arc, Secondary Action, Timing, Exaggeration, Solid Drawing, and Appeal.

I'm far from being an expert. The gap between learning Adobe Flash animation initially in my senior year of high school and Intro to Animation is four years, and I never bothered to work on the craft. That's on me.

Traditional Animation

Experimental Animation

These are stop-motion exercises to practice applying the 12 principles of animation. 

I didn't like how my group went about doing this project, and I can't really blame them too much since we all had conflicting schedules. We had decided to divide the short film, which was supposed to be 1 minute total, into four 15 second segments since there were four of us. There was a severe lack of communication, though I did my best to hold everyone together and make sure they all got their parts in, and in the way we had discussed. To preface this, I was responsible for the second segment, the only live-action sequence in the entire video. I wound up having to edit all of our clips together the night before this project was due.

Someone in our group suggested that we do an anime fight scene using rotoscoping, which to my my knowledge was tracing over live action footage to create realistic and fluid animation. But they would be tracing other over people's animated scenes, so that was shot down in favor of just a regular fight scene between a person in red and person in blue. I had to keep checking in with my group members on how we ended/began each transition so they were all smooth or at least comprehensible. I was told by the guy who did the first part that he would end his segment with the red guy throwing the blue person into the screen, which is why my segment begins with Blue falling away from the camera. Apparently the first group member either forgot or got lazy, and whatever else happened led to how the other segments went.

I carried this assignment for us, I don't give a fuck what anyone says.

Pre-Production

We next moved onto the pre-production phase of animation. Our professor had done freelance illustration and prop design work in the animation industry, so this was a bit of her teaching us the ropes of pre-production work. First we began with a rough animatic.

As you saw in my 2015-2020 Personal Projects page, there's a character design for "The Crackhead." A friend and I had watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters and thought, "what if Godzilla went up against a crackhead?" This is what I came up with. Obviously due to the PG parameters of a school setting, I could not outright state that the bag has dope in it.

Next we moved onto character design as we drew inspiration from an established IP to create a character that would fit that setting. In addition to prop design, we were also tasked with character turnarounds, but I never did them. I had chosen Adventure Time and actually used an OC of friend of mine with his permission.