Self Portrait Project — Liam: Animation

For my self-portrait project I am making an animation about some of the things that build up my¬ personality. These are the things that I believe have shaped me as a person, like my interests and life experiences in my fourteen years of living. The reason I chose to make an animation is because while I have always appreciated animated movies and shows (like most kids,) I have only really gotten into the technical process about a year ago. As I looked at what different talented people had made with animation, I started to understand that you could really make anything, and that the only real shackle is your imagination. It made me really interested in it. My goal with the visual component was to reflect on what I think builds up my personality and what has made me who I am today, with different scenes and transitions showing some of the many things that in my opinion make me up. A challenge was trying to come up with semi-unique ideas about the things I was mentioning earlier. I wanted to make it more grounded in reality at first but realized it doesn't have to be realistic and I can make many goofy and fun things with it. As I said before, I just had to use my imagination. The way I made this project was a combination of different animation processes and principles. A normal animated video is shot/animated in 24 frames per second. How I animated it was that I had the video settings at 30 frames per seconds, which felt better to me because I could make the animation look smoother. I used two different methods in the animation process. I used a pose-to-pose method and a straight-ahead method. The pose-to-pose method is where you plan out the motion by making separate poses of the beginning, middle, and end. And then you add in frames in-between to make a full movement. The straight-ahead method is where you don't really have every pose planned out; you just keep drawing frames until the movement is over. I don't usually use the pose-to-pose method. I like to just come up with things and put them on the virtual canvas. But with this, I thought it might be good to plan out certain scenes, with some being more complicated than others. I enjoyed this project because I not only got to develop my skills but got to try out new things to see what worked and what I had to work on more. And to be honest, I just simply enjoy the animation process.

See his presentation: https://youtu.be/ftC208uE3XE