Week Three

William Cox
May 20th, 2016
Senior Project

Week Three

This was officially my last week at proctor. It was definitely a sad time for me, but also strangely

happy, just in different ways. Im happy to move on to new grounds, but I'm sad that I'm leaving

behind what has definitely become my home for most of my life. I feel that this week I was able to

channel a lot of my emotion into my work, and get a solid amount done. Not only was the sheer

amount of work that I got done considerably solid, but the quality and variety of the work as well. I

learned through my experiences working on my animation this week that the end result of a project

does not always look as it was expected to. In this case, I did not really have any idea of what I

wanted my animation to look like, so I actually have found that I am mostly satisfied with the final

result. Of course I wish I could have made it much longer, and more visually intensive. I also wish

that I could have spent more time making each motion more fluid. This is a hard process, and to

accomplish it I would have to have created much more frames, which would have taken much more

time. Overall I feel very proud about my project, and I cannot wait to present it to whoever decides to

come check it out!

May 20th, 2016

William Cox
May 20th, 2016
Senior Project

The Last Day

Today was my last official day of working on my project. Of course I will have to do some more writing and paperwork, as well as preparation for the presentation. But after today my animation process is completely finished. It was a sad feeling at first, but I have a feeling it will not be the last animation I create in my lifetime. I worked on some random scenes to go into the mix with a lot of the other random scenes. At first I tried to animate a tesseract, which is a four dimensional cube, but that quickly became far to difficult. And instead tried to make a flowing hallway that somewhat reminded me of the a-ha video for Take on Me. This worked out okay. I don't know if it was as flowing as I expected it to be, but it was definitely something that I will add to my final production, because it looks cool either way. Even if it needs a few more key frames her and there, to smoothen out the motion. After today all I really have to do is catch up on some blogs and write my weekly reflection, as well as writing my three to five page paper that I am oh-so exited for. And then prepare for my presentation and hope for the best. 

May 19th, 2016

William Cox
May 19th, 2016
Senior Project

Thursday

Today I worked more on my animation. I had to move all of my equipment into the tech department to do more work, because in Slocumb they were preparing for the art show. This did not hinder me one bit. I decided to animate a scene in which the man who was falling off of the cliff sprouted wings and landed safely. This took me a long time to figure out how to animate. In the long run I kind of took the easy way out and simply rotated the paper instead of redrawing the figure at a new angle every frame, but this saved some of my precious time so I could move on to the next scene first thing tomorrow!

May 18th, 2016

William Cox

May 18th, 2016

Senior Project

Wednesday

Today I got in as early as I could and began to work on my animation. I started some new scenes. I decided that I may want to use this James Blake song called I Never Learnt To Share. It is a dark song of a very specific genre called organic dubstep. Which is basically a song that has the patterns and sounds of a dubstep song, except it is played on the an electric organ. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSvb_jGwQ7s

Because of the lyrics, I decided to animate a scene where two figures are talking to each other, and another is left out. This scene quickly became very dark, as I animated the figure who was left out walking off of the edge of a massive cliff, and falling. While he is falling he has this thought bubble that expands to take up the whole screen. I think I will use this scene as the introduction to my final video. 

May 17th, 2016

William Cox
May 17th, 2016
Senior Project

Tuesday

Today I worked on the technological part of my project. I spent my time collecting and downloading all the images from my camera into a computer in the computer lab. I then imported them into Final Cut Pro, a professional grade video editing program, and configured them into an animation. This was difficult because I had to find the right frame rate so that the animation would look fluid, but also go somewhat slow, so that It would not be too quick. I then spent the rest of my day adding sound to the animation. I made several copies of the project without sound, so that If I decide that I do not like the sounds I chose then I can choose some new sounds for the animation. I definitely want sound to be a part of it though, because all the animations I have watched online have lots of sound, and it adds immensely to the atmosphere that the artist is trying to create. Choosing the sound effects and the background ambience/song will be a journey in itself. 

May 16th, 2016

William Cox

May 16th, 2016

Senior Project

Monday

Today I got in early, feeling good and ready to go. I began working on my elephant, but quickly put him aside when I had an idea for a new scene. This scene included an eye, which cries a tear that then sprouts a plant, and the eye becomes a sun over the plant. This scene took up the rest of my day, which is somewhat sad because of how short it actually is. For this scene I used a new tactic, instead of drawing and erasing on the same sheet of paper, I began to use several sheets of paper over each other, because I could see through the first sheet, I could then draw on the second sheet with precise marks, so that the objects in the scene could move with fluidity in the final animation. I am beginning to worry that I will not have enough animation to have a presentable project at the end of the term. But at the same time I am happy to be back making progress in the studio, and plan to continue my endeavor tomorrow at lightening pace. I think that for this animation to be presentable I will need to come up with a lot more filler, and some longer scenes, because as of right now I only have short scenes, minus the scene I shot on the first day, which makes up most of the actual animation. Perhaps I can come up with a way to do a similar scene, because that scene required less drawing and erasing and more just capturing frames for the final animation. Which speeds up the process a lot and makes it far less tedious. 

Week Two

William Cox
May 17th, 2016
Senior Project

Week Two

This was my first week of animation on senior project. I learned a lot from my experience in the 

woods and tried to apply it to my animation project. This week I learned that animation can be very 

difficult. Through various attempts at different scenes, and failures vast and many, I have learned that 

anything that you want to accomplish takes a lot of time. I believe this is a good motto for not only 

animation, but many things in life. Though I really liked my first couple days of animation, my 

motivation seemed to fizzle out a bit towards the end of the week, as I began to accomplish less and 

less each day. Im hoping that my weekend will rejuvenate my motivation and allow me to make 

further progress once again. Everything this week happened mostly as expected. My days of feeling 

very down and under the weather came as somewhat of a surprise, I was kind of expecting to be 

exited about the project through and through. I believe that this week has been a learning experience 

for me, it has shown me what I can accomplish in a short amount of time if I am truly motivated. And 

I also realized how much work I can miss out on if I lack motivation. In my next week I hope to learn 

how best to accomplish this motivation, because this truly has been the deciding factor on how much 

work I can get done. I feel that with motivation I could create a truly wonderful and amazing 

animation, but I know that finding this motivation takes time, and I believe the animation that will 

come out of this senior project will not be something I am entirely happy with. I will be proud of it, 

but I think that If I were to create something I really loved, I would need a lot more time.