Personal Project Blog

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:

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.

The file for the closeup of the president

The file for the white house

The Ps file for the tree scene

A robot friend I made midway through the project, unused

The multiplane Ps file

Here's a collage of what the development looked like.

The layers for the character file

Layers for the character file, continued