Module Reflection

After four month, I have finished my animation course. It is a great experience for me to learn how to create an animation from zero to two minutes.

From the beginning of this course, flash is the first software I use to make the animation. It took me a long time on the first 15-second sample with using the Flash. However, after the reading week, we started to use Affect Effect that I think it is much more useful than Flash. It is easier and save a lot of time for me to make my final animation. The online tutorial helps me a lot. As the plan below, I was trying to record the sound to connect each plot of my animation, but I found that recording sound will spend a lot of time and it is difficult to create the effect I want. So I try to use the music to run through my animation. And I try to make some plot to fit the rhythm.

Although there is no any practice course in my spring term study, I still want to spend some time on the animation study. And during the long summer holiday I have, I may pick up some drawing class that I could improve my hand drawing skill on the characters.

Project description

The name of the story is ‘Leaving’. Main purpose of this animation is highlighting the love of grandma. The story is inspired by a video called ‘A Grandma’s Love’ that is published by Charles Bernardo’s. It is a story based on part of the video. Grandson will leave to study abroad in the next few days. Grandma felt sad, and she is not willing to see her grandson leave. However, she still made a scarf for him as a gift. Finally, she witnessed the plane take off in the airport.

Most of the elements in ‘Leaving’ are constructed by the primary color. The painting of Piet Mondrian affects me a lot on the use of colors. Most of his paintings use the straight line, right angles and primary colors. As George Maestri said that primary colors among the many possible hues of expression. Visually, primary colors can give a stark contrast to the audience. Audience can easily define each element.

‘Leaving’ is not only trying to present the love of grandma, it also refers to the geographic separation between the younger children and their older parents. Owing to the rapid development of the economic in the urban area, adults are looking forward to living in the city instead of the village. The old parents are more cherish for the fewer meeting between them. Take the children study abroad here as the example is trying to remain everyone to spend more time with their older parents.

Adding the sound and music

The whole story 'Leaving' is running through by the music called 'moonlight rise' by Kai Engal. At first I want to add the music in premiere, but I find that it is difficult to fit my animation with the music. So I nearly make all the elements in After Effect. It is easy to fit each plot with the music rhythm in After Effect.

Last scene

The last scene in my story is grandma witness the plane taking off. And I will gradually zoom in to her eyes and try to put her grandson in it. Firstly set the opacity as zero and then change it to around 90. The problem I found in this scene is that I need to change the original size of my picture to a larger size. Because I need to put Jack in grandma’s eye which I should change the scale to around 600%.

                              

Change the storyline

After working on my animation for few weeks, there are some changes on the animation that I made.



The first one is the story title. The title is 'The love of grandma' before. However, it seems too straight forward. It tells the main idea to the audience directly. So I will change the title to 'Leaving'. This title can give some space to audience to image. Who is going to to leave? where is he or she leaving to? What happen because of his or her leaving? These questions might come out before watching the animation.



Another thing I changed is the content. In the project proposal, the story is about grandma feels so nervous when her grandson has a check in the hospital. The main plot of it is to describe her nervous through different action. Now what I want to present in the animation is that her grandson will study abroad in the next few days. She finds it in the calendar and feels sad about it. She plans to do something before he leaves. She decided to make a scarf to her grandson a s gift. After receiving the scarf, her grandson feels so moved and leave with tear. The last scene is that grandma stands in the mirror in the airport, witnesses the plane takes off.

walking cycle and first 3D us

In the video below, I try to make a walking cycle for the grandson to leave the house and use the 3D effect for the door to make it open naturally.

New Idea and Piet Mondrian

I have been working for my animation for a few days. During the work in these days, some new ideas come out. At first, the story 'The love of grandma' is about how grandma feel worried about his grandson since she finds out he has something wrong on his body. However I find it difficult for me to present it logically on the screen. So I decided to change a way to express the grandma's love which is typically happen around us especially the foreign students. It is about the grandma feels sad because her grandson needs to study abroad and  they can't meet each other for a long time. Hence she makes a scarf for her grandson before he leaves. And the whole plot about it would use music called 'Moonlight Reprise' which I download from a free license website (http://freemusicarchive.org/) to present the sad feeling of grandma.

In these days when I put some color on characters. The painting of Piet Mondrian does affect me a lot. His painting is using the primary. It gives a stark contrast to the audience. So I decide to use primary colors as the main color on my character.