Character Animation

For this project we decided to team up! Our group consists of Rita O-Young, Sean Donovan, and Johnny Sim.

We started out by first compiling our various characters and then planning by writing down our ideas in a chronological order of events that would occur. We decided upon a cheesy action movie type of plot for our story, with the clay mini-sean figurine being the antagonist and the superhero figurines being the heroines. Our John Cena toy served to be our damsel in distress. After deciding on our story, we began to prep to begin shooting. Rita drew the simple backgrounds for the shots, Sean prepared the camera with the tripod to measure our frame size, and Johnny attached string to all of our characters for easier manipulation. After all of this prep, we were ready to start animating. We also ended up doing extra prep between each shot depending on when a new background was needed or the characters needed more string attached to them.

 In terms of ideas, we definitely collaborated a ton while hashing out the story and deciding on how to shoot the scenes and which various jokes we wanted to include. For the majority of the animation Sean was manning the camera and helping direct the shots, Rita held the strings of the characters and animated some characters, and Johnny did a majority of character animation. The way we animated the more complicated scenes was that Rita would hold the strings of the characters to keep them in place as Johnny would move the character and Sean was photographing.

We definitely did switch off with animating and photographing, for example the "hacker" scene was photographed by Johnny and animated by Rita. Sean did a majority of directing the look of each shot. For the most part we stuck to our original roles, switching off where needed. With the car drift scene we definitely took inspiration from what we learned in class.

Post production was definitely pretty challenging, we switched off photographing with Sean/s camera and Johny's Surfacebook so we had to combine photos from two sources. We then compiled all of our footage from both devices in Premier. Sean and Johnny did the majority of compilation in Premier while Rita wrote out our blog post. We then recorded audio together on Johnny's Surfacebook and synced it into the Premier file.

Our goal with this project was to make something both memorable and hilarious. Upon looking at our final product we're definitely happy with it! We were able to do much more as a team than if we had worked alone. Remember to listen with audio!