M. Marshall 4.28

It is crazy to know that the semester is in its last week. I will probably never forget this class and some of the things that it’s taught me. I think going into it I did not have accurate expectations for what the course would be, but that’s a good thing. Over the semester, I’ve really honed in on my digital drawing skills, which was extremely beneficial for my final project that I animated. Even looking at the difference between my first daily creates artwork and more recent artwork I think there’s been a major shift in my understanding of and abilities at this skill.

I don’t even want to show it, it’s so bad!

I get really caught up on the fact that my work isn’t perfect or that I could’ve done better if I had just done something another way, and I think that is great for growth, but in this reflection I really want to appreciate how I’ve grown. I learned a lot about shading and color theory. My growth in understanding color theory is well represented by the Adelson’s Checker Shadow Illusion. If you can believe it, squares A and B are the same color

I can’t believe it either, don’t worry. That aside, the reason is our perception that there is shadow over a “white” tile is because our brains are filling in information. I cannot prove to you that what I am telling you is true, but I’ve used an eye dropper tool, and it is definitely the same. The best way to know is to check for yourself, but here’s the best way I have to show you. I drew a line right over, did not stop. It’s freaky.

Another thing I honed in on was my story telling skills and creating a world and thinking about nuances within that world. Toward the beginning I relied on things like other TV shows I had seen and couldn’t really go far beyond what I had come up with.

I honestly feel much better equipped in my creativity and storytelling. Over a relatively short period of time I was able to let myself be free to create ideas, even if I cringed a little bit.

I also worked on my video editing skills, which was really fun to learn about. I think I should create a vlog YouTube channel. I am honestly very proud of myself for some of the stuff I’ve made. I did some photo editing, and I really tried to challenge myself, but it was mostly just to be funny, here are some examples!

Video editing

Photo editing:

And last, but certainly not least, work on my character:

I worked really hard to have my character be consistent but also ever improving, hopefully, the viewers will feel that she is!

Let’s talk about my work timeline:

Week one:

I drew a lot to see what kind of thing I was aiming for and how it would look, the preliminary sketches definitely look very different from the end result. I focused on watching animation videos (which had really interesting techniques that ended up being too complicated for my level of knowledge). I would watch my cat as I drew to see how she looked at different angles. I wrote down the story and I spent a lot of time drawing out what I wanted the background to look like, where characters would move, all of that. I considered the story aspect a lot and the moving parts of how to make people committed to a character in a (very) short film. Toward the end of the week, I started on animating.

Week two:

This is the bulk time that I spent animating, I had scenes, lines, beginning drawings, just not a finished project. I became best friends with the layers section because it allowed me to move things around more easily, I could erase writing but not the speech bubbles behind it, I could use the lasso tool to move a character but not everything behind it. I probably spent around 20-25 hours animating it. It was no joke. It ended up only being about 2 minutes long, but I hope you can see the effort I put in to the quality of the drawings. For things like crying, took a slide, copied it, edited it a smidge, copied that, edited that a smidge more, until I was able to show a character crying. The scene that took the most work was definitely the laboratory scene.

Originally, I wanted it to have audio, but my voice does not work very well to be a guy, and I think that the meaningful thing here is that people can relate to the characters, and I thought that my voice would pull people out of the scene. I tried to add music, but I really struggled with the copyrighting policies of YouTube and finding music that I liked, so unfortunately I ultimately had to scrap that.

Previous knowledge of my storyline is definitely beneficial to understand the plot. In the radio show, the ending was more depressing. I think that this would have been more long and drawn out and show more characters, but by the end I was running very low on time, unfortunately we cannot win ’em all. I was thinking a lot about how I wanted to show the intersection of humanity and technology. In the story, the animals gain human like cognition from the combination of artificial intelligence and the animals’ pre-existing sentience. In this, the government is mostly able to stop emotions in animals because it restricts the parts of the brain creating them, like the amygdala. In the end, that combination of artificial intelligence and sentience is able to save D41SY because she recognizes her owner and the love that she has for him overrides government interference. I really feel proud of this project because it really wouldn’t be me if the end of the story wasn’t something about how love perseveres and real love can’t be broken by technology and the government.

Thank you for tuning in to my creative process! I hope you enjoyed!