First of all, if you haven't already, you can watch my animation here.
What was the scope of the project?
The scope of the project wasn't huge, but I think that was good as it gave me more time to make the animation satisfying to watch.
The Process
1) Storyboarding:
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| The file with the characters in it |
My storyboard, pictured to the right, was pretty simple: the president needs to eat a snickers, so he sends his personal dinosaur to go and get it. The dinosaur goes to get the snickers, and in the process, has to have a short civil disagreement with a tree.
Next, I did the drawings for the characters. Aside from the INCLUSIVE, PROGRESSIVE orange-man hybrid, all of them made it into the final animation. The dinosaur, who was called Reginald for a while, had his from the back perspective added later. The president also went through a change or two. I lost a file where I'd had a hole in the desk and an eye poking out of the hole. And no, the yellow background wasn't always there. Other than that, there wasn't a whole lot of storyboarding done.
Production
I started by rigging up each of the characters in the characters.psd file. Next, I started on the different backgrounds (the White House, the multiplane, and the tree scene) which ended up being a bit more difficult than I wanted, as I accidentally deleted the zoomed out white house when making the closeup. Other than that, the rest of the background design was smooth sailing. After that, I had to put everything into aftereffects and get to work. In aftereffects, I also didn't have too much trouble with anything besides Reginald's walk cycle, as that turned out to be a real pain in the neck. I didn't learn a whole lot of new skills from this but I certainly did learn how to do everything with a bit more polish. If I could do anything different, I'd put more effort into my storyboarding and maybe a bit more polish into the art style, though I do like how this one turned out all in all. I'd definitely keep the tone from this one, as it was pretty funny at points. In general, this project was a laugh and a half and I think it was a worthwhile investment of time, if only to use as a "before" picture.
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| The file for the closeup of the president |
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| The file for the white house |
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| The Ps file for the tree scene |
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| A robot friend I made midway through the project, unused |
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| The multiplane Ps file |
Here's a collage of what the development looked like.
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| The layers for the character file |
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| Layers for the character file, continued |
