Animated Storytime
A Motion Graphics Project
Each student will create his or her own animation using characters of their own creation, or a composite following a narrative. The emphasis of this project will be to make a story come to life using composite and animation techniques shown in class.
Some ideas for this story can be:
1) A Motion Graphic Novel
2) A non/fiction representation of literature
3) A brief history of something (with an animated timeline?)
4) An animated poem
5) An animation of a concept you are studying in school (ie a historical event, a math concept, a synopsis of a piece of literature, etc)
The video will be a minimum of 30s in length.
Students will use skills from ongoing tutorials and assignments in class using Photoshop, After Effects, and Flash.
All projects must be submitted by the deadline of October 17th, 2011
A full page rundown of the story/narrative concept you wish to animate is due Wednesday the 21st of September by the beginning of class
First phase of making your stories into an actual animation is to create a storyboard.
There are storyboard programs you can use to help you out.
Your storyboards should have a pictorial representation of a frame in the scene
and a description of the scene in a format that follows:
- 1) Type of shot
2) Duration of shot
3) Special Effects
4) Description of the scene
Here's a tutorial on how to create a walk cycle, and Part 2, Part 3
An alternative way to animate a character in Flash CS5 is using the Bone Tool
Here's a tutorial to get you started, and another one explaining the IK chain
Speech can be quite tricky. Here's a video tutorial series that breaks it down into simple steps:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Here's the reference image sited in the above tutorials.
On an unrelated note, here's how to morph in After Effects, but to do this tutorial, you'll need RE:Flex Morph, which you can download and install for free here
Here's a Flash fight scene tutorial:
http://www.gotoandplay.it/_articles/2006/06/beatemup.php
Good on ye.
Here are some tutorials for particles in After Effects as per the ones we did in class:
Liquid
Fire
The simple steps for creating fire can be followed thusly:
1) Create a new solid, call it fiya laya
2) Add CC Particle World to fiya laya
3) Apply Fast Blur to fiya laya
4) Apply Turbulent Displacement
5) Add Colorama Effect
6) Add Sharpen Effect
7) Apply a glow effect
Animation Project Final Grade
Students' grades for the 30 second short animation will be weighed equally on their presentations and their final submitted videos.
The presentations will be hosted on each student's blog and he or she will have 5 minutes to
- explain the general concept of the story
- how s/he went about accomplishing goals
- what skills and techniques were learned along the way
- the method, and process of creating the animation
- explain the current state of the animation to be presented.
The final submitted video will be graded based on meeting the criteria for the assignment (a >=30 second animation of a complete story with a beginning, middle and end), the quality of the content, and how it displays the student's learned skills.
