In my Digital Design and Animation class we have begun discussing different types animation, and their histories. Animation and movies interest me and I have even used some of the animation types we have gone over in class. We are currently working in Adobe Illustrator and doing "traditional" animation. We were assigned to make an animation of a ball that lasted 10 seconds. To do this, we had to make 120 images because we had 1 drawing every 2 frames and we needed roughly 24 frames per second to be up to par with professional animations. This left us with 120 different frames to make our animation. Creating the background setting was fun and making the path for the ball was interesting but then I hit the tedious part of the process...Making each individual frame and saving them individually. We had to adjust our picture to make only one ball show and then save that picture. Then re-hide the ball and make the next one in sequence show up and so on. This process took me about the entirety of one (school) day. There were multiple settings that had to be adjusted with each picture as well as the squashing and stretching of the ball. Squashing and stretching is a technique that is used when animating a bouncing object. The "stretch" is when the ball is in the air and going towards the ground or coming directly out of a bounce. What you have to do to create the illusion of a real bounce is elongate the object for "stretch". For "squash" you have to expand the object outwards and like the name suggests: squash it. You need to do "squash" when your object hits the ground or the frames directly following. I ended up with an animation of a ball falling out of the ceiling in a grocery store and the ball bouncing into a shopping cart. This assignment helped me learn and think about how animations are made as well how to create the illusion of realistic motion.
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One of my favorite assignments we did this year was an assignment in Adobe Illustrator. The assignment was to create an "alternate" movie poster (a poster that hadn't been made yet). We had the liberty to choose any movie, design and style for our poster which was one of my favorite parts of the project. I chose to do a poster for "The Grinch" because I liked the book "How the Grinch stole Christmas" a lot when I was younger and it was almost Christmas time when we did the project. The tools I used a lot were the copy and paste tools as well as the arrange tools. I wanted the focus to be in the foreground but I had a lot of things in the background so I had lots of work to do with the arrange tools (moving things forwards and backwards). I used the copy and paste tools to create repetition. An example of this are the houses in the background of my poster. I created three different types of houses and made each one special. Then I copied and pasted them in a random order to create the sense of various houses instead of a repetitious, single house. I looked at some movie posters prior to this project to get a sense of what techniques were used and to get some ideas. I noticed that many focused on a point in the foreground but also had a background scene so that is what I decided to do with mine. I had the Grinch in the foreground on an ice ledge overlooking the town. In the center of the town is a very large Christmas tree with lights and a star on top. The Grinch is shown pulling the lights off of the Christmas tree and piling them on his ledge. On the right side of the tree (the side furthest from the Grinch) all of the houses are dark and gloomy. The houses on the left side (the side closest to the Grinch) are colored with the classic Christmas green and red. This was meant to represent the Grinch "stealing" Christmas by showing that the houses without lights were dark and gloomy while the houses from which the Grinch hadn't stolen from yet were festive and colorful. I had lots of fun with this project because there was lots of creative room and time to experiment. This project really helped me learn how to use Adobe Illustrator and many of its features.
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AuthorI am Giacomo Hardin and this is my blog. I will be reflecting on my time in Digital Design and Game Art class. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Archives
May 2020
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