Reading & Writing
The final chapter in Liz Blazer’s Animated Storytelling, entitled “Show and Tell,” covers all that it takes to get your project out there. Once your film is complete, it’s time to get it out there! Here, Blazer provides her readers with details and considerations to make surrounding packaging a project, submitting to festivals (or not), networking, and sharing. My favorite tips from this chapter are the ones regarding networking.
Often, upon completing a project, we jump straight into sharing the entire project, expecting that others will see it, engage with it, and, hopefully, share it. Surprisingly, Blazer encourages her readers to first connect with peers. This includes like-minded artists, as well as people that “share a common thread with the story” of your work. Blazer’s next tip is to “Be a Good Audience.” It’s important to be supportive of other peers, as what goes around comes around. Building rapport and relationships with other individuals will likely result in genuine feedback and support when it’s your turn to share. Furthermore, Blazer stresses that self-promotion is successful in moderation and the proper settings.
Another key part of networking involves splicing up your work, sharing it in bits and pieces. Blazer suggests teasing your work out over time to pique the interest of others so that they are requesting to see it. After sharing bits of the project, share the whole thing and ask for feedback. Finally, networking in person can be highly beneficial. Get comfortable in your own skin and don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. You never know what can happen.
Blazer closes the chapter with one last encouragement, “never stop.” She describes being an artist as a “constant itch” that needs to be scratched. When the itch returns, it’s time to start the process again with a new project and a fresh idea.
Overall, as a creative person, Animated Storytelling has been informative and inspirational from start to finish. I loved Blazer’s writing style and her funny little stories and scenarios. She consistently supported her work with examples and offered great tips and advice along the way. The most important thing I learned through reading this book was to be intentional in practice with all projects. Every step of developing a project involves a tool or practice that will help refine and support the story while keeping things organized. From creating a creative brief to elevator pitches, sketching, storyboarding, selecting audio, you name it, Blazer provided me with a distinct strategy to create a solid project without it feeling overwhelming or intimidating.
Research
When working with motion and/or animation, the possibilities are endless. Here are some examples of phenomenal uses of motion, effects, and animation.
Between 2020 and the beginning of this year, my husband and I played parts one and two of a video game called The Last of Us. I always wondered how some of the scenes were created, but never took the time to look into it until now. Here’s some paralleled footage of motion-captured scenes used to create scenes from the game. The quality and editing aren’t the best, but, having played the games, I can appreciate the work that goes into creating it.
This Yoplait commercial uses animation to advertise their products creatively and expressively. The ad maintains real representations of the yogurt and gogurt moving through a playful, colorful, paper-like world. The transitions between scenes are quick, yet engaging and well-thought out.
Adobe is the most recognized creative software company, so it’s only fitting that their advertisements incorporate motion, animation, and special effects all at once. If you happen to catch their latest Premiere Pro ad on YouTube, check it out.
Create
Initially, I had a few ideas floating around for my final project. I settled upon revisiting my onion-skinned animation from Module 1 and revamping it with some of the skills I have acquired throughout this course. I took the first frame of my outlined Instax camera, created in Photoshop, and utilized Procreate to add color and polish it. Next, I challenged myself to use animation assist, a Procreate feature, for the first time to animate a button push, flash, and the film coming out of the camera, frame by frame. In the succeeding frames, I scaled previous frames larger, little by little until they filled the screen, zooming into a photo containing my actual Instax camera. I made sure to line up the real Instax with the illustrated one. This allowed me to fade the real one out to reveal the illustration in the first frame, ending where we started.
Once all my frames were complete and the animation looped, I exported an mp4 and moved to Premiere Pro. Here, I added sound and reworked some of the zooming frames to make the movement smoother. Eventually, I had the bright idea to change the background to embody more of a beach/travel feel and help tie everything together, considering the oceanside soundtrack and the beach photo within the film. Unfortunately, I created my frames in Procreate using solid backgrounds within each frame. Revisiting the background within my animation meant removing the background I had already created. I opted to try it anyway and further familiarize myself with the program. This time around, I moved faster and ended up with two variations of the animation that I appreciate equally.
Working between two programs prompted me to consider all the software I’ve utilized during this course. I find that each program is unique, housing distinct strengths and weaknesses. A zooming effect may appear to be choppy using Procreate’s animation assist. However, zooming using the scale and position keyframes in Premiere Pro would result in a much smoother motion. Due to the various projects I have completed within this course, I now have a better idea of which programs may suit me best for any given project. Furthermore, my skill and knowledge levels have increased alongside my confidence in myself as a creator of motion-related media. I really enjoy animation and motion graphics and, in the future, I look forward to experimenting with more styles and mediums and potentially introducing them into my daily work as a graphic designer.
Sola's Thoughts 