Project 1: THE INTRODUCTION!

Mission:  Create a short animated work of art that introduces yourself or a created character of your choosing!

Project Length: 3 Weeks (2 and a half weeks in class, one half week out of class.)

Goal: Warm up those rusty animation skills by diving head first into animation!  Start building out your portfolio by learning how to create short, practical assignments for yourself!  Your favorite artists find work and gigs through their portfolios and social media presence. Begin making your own content so you can get comfortable making a lot of small things!

Remember: The professional has, more than anything else, applied experience. They gained experience by conducting projects. The more projects they do, no matter how small, the more experience they gain!  Do not train by spending your time learning how to "throw the best punch once."  Train by "throwing a lot of punches", and learning why each one is a little better than the last one.

Steps to completion: 

• Record a vocal clip. (if you want someone else to voice your final character, record a scratch track for now. (We will do this next class!)
• Sketch a character and environment for this clip. (Bring in your sketches on this date!)
• Storyboard a sequence to this dialogue.
• Complete final designs for environment and character.
• Conduct layout for camera work, color, and background placement.
• Animate this sequence.
• Color this sequence!
• Conduct final post production and editing on this sequence! At this stage, we will begin working on your next project, but we will still cover audio production and editing to ensure you get this right!

Begin Reading:  Natalie Nourigat's "I Moved to LA to work in Animation!"

• Have it completely read by Next Monday so we can discuss it! It should take you about 2 hours to finish completely.
• First and foremost, I give you this book to read to learn more about different pathways to working in animation, illustration, storyboarding, and other professional avenues.
• Her professional path DOES NOT have to be your own. 
• Read this book as more of an understanding at the potential challenges and success one may have when working in any professional environment dedicated to arts creation and production!

Future Dates:

• Begin coming up with ideas for your larger 45 second project that you will create this semester. Start sketching characters, making storyboards, etc.  At the end of blog posts, I will give "suggested large project production milestones" to help keep you on track with this project.
• suggested large project production milestones for this week:
• sketch out some character and environment ideas.
• write down some story sketches.
• buy some index cards and start drawing a 12 card sequence for your film idea.
• keep it rough, keep it loose!
• focus on the major milestones!
• keep it simple!  The audience will get complexity out of it better this way!

ADDITIONAL LINKS:

• A refresher for using toon boom harmony
• A link to the first part of the King of the Hill documentary.  The creators built a small introduction for the characters as a pencil test. This was done to try to get approval of the show on network TV. By having a small video that explains who the characters were, it make the world BELIEVABLE, and helped others understand their idea in less time!
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