Case Study: Art 147: Digital Animation Final Client: Professor Krikun, Westchester Community College

Artist: Patrick Monroe

Project Title: Hunt for the Eleventh Angel

Duration: 1 semester

Description:

The final project for Digital Animation at Westchester Community College for the Fall 2016 semester was the presentation of an animation created primarily with Adobe Flash Professional CC 2015, supplemented by Adobe Premiere CC 2015.

The goal was to write, design, produce backgrounds for, storyboard, ink, animate, compose, and add sounds effects, titles, and credits to an original work of animation, produced over one semester of 16 weeks. Additionally, blog posts demonstrating progress and showcasing inspirations were required each week.

The final animation was to have at least one scene fully animated, or 30 seconds of full animation. Each scene was meant to have all its storyboards inked and colored. Sound effects were required, and backing music was encouraged. The animation was to be rendered into .FLA, .MOV, and .MP4 files, uploaded to a YouTube account, and shown on our personal blog.

Research

I decided to base my animation on a character and setting from an existing anime series, Evangelion. In researching techniques, gathering inspiration, and taking reference images, I watched the original 1996 series, Neon Genesis Evangelion, its 1997 sequel film, End of Evangelion, and the films in the Rebuild of Evangelion series, Evangelion 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone (2007), Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance (2009), and Evangelion 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (2012).

I watched and consumed various other works of anime and Western animation for inspiration.

One repeatedly useful reference was a model kit I own. The figure is of Evangelion Unit-02, the main character in my animation, and I used it to capture poses, which I could then draw freehand, or occasionally, take photos of in order to rotoscope.

Challenges

The biggest challenges were the management of time, energy, and ambition. I feel that the work is still not complete, which speaks for my difficulties in planning and executing. Backgrounds, for example, are lacking, and a few storyboards never made it to the inked phase.

Conceptualizing was not as difficult as expected. Using initial designs and sounds from the Evangelion franchise helped fill gaps in the process.

The ambition I had for this project was a little excessive. Given that I had two other 3-credit courses to balance, I figured I could achieve what I visualized within the time frame. I could have, but it probably would have killed me.

Access to Flash Professional was sometimes a challenge, but the campus at Westchester Community College’s Valhalla location offered many accessible computers with the Adobe suit of software.

Managing my own anxiety and stress was a considerable challenge. Often throughout the semester the cumulative worry consumed my attention. Sometimes balancing my focus between the project and the work in my other classes required a lot of deliberation.

Strategy

The animation final was a difficult beast to wrangle. The steps of the process were to:

1. Write the treatment: a script that describes what happens in the animation. 2. Draw character designs for each character appearing in the work. 3. Produce storyboards for every major keyframe. 4. Scan the storyboards and process them in Adobe Photoshop. 5. Create an animatic by importing the processed files to Adobe Flash and setting

them to a timeline. 6. Find and import sound files to be used in Flash or added afterwards in Adobe

Premiere. 7. Digitally ink and color the imported storyboards in Flash. 8. Animate the sequences with motion. 9. Add visual effects. 10. Render the work as a video file and upload it to YouTube, then link the video to

the Wordpress blog.

Design Approach

I initially wanted to use a very simple art style, with my main character drawn in cartoonish proportions (‘chibi’). Before drawing the storyboards, I decided I had the resources and skills to draw the character in full.

All of the drawing in the work was done on a Wacom Intuos3 Pro drawing tablet. This was a great boon to inking and animating and allowed work to be done much faster than using a traditional mouse alone.

Flash defined some of the art design itself, as I used the brush tool for linework, which automatically smooths out each line drawn. I found this useful at some times, and limiting at others.

Ultimately the work is very anime-inspired, using a lot of pauses and minimal motion to show events.

Effectiveness

The strategies and techniques I used were not effective enough to complete the work on time. This includes the ability to wrangle ambition, the single biggest reason the animation is not quite complete.

However, as I decided early on in the design process, my goal was to aim high and achieve more than I could if I had aimed lower. I managed to succeed here.

This project has taught me a lot about effective use of energy, time, and planning. I plan to complete the animation after this class has finished and after I have reworked my approach.

Budget

None.