There is also a wide variety of what can be deemed an animated character. It's not always a person, a robot or a "Wascally Wabbit." It could be the letter "Q." It could be anything you can think of that you can bring to life. It could even be a simple box:
There's a huge variety of character animation techniques as well. There's lush, extravagant 3D Pixar-style CGI animation and there's photo cut-out Jib-Jab-style animation:
There's cel animation and there's flip-book animation. There's even things like stop-motion King Kong-style or South Park-style* animation to consider.
What I'm looking for you to create initially is a story that runs 30 seconds or more for whatever kind of character you choose. Something that will bring your character and/or it's environment to life. A quick storyline to establish your character and give it life beyond a simple walk cycle. It could be a narrative voiceover, it could be your character(s) talking in English, a music track, a tribal language from the jungles of Papua/New Guinea, the coolest language ever devised... whatever. As long as it tells a story. Then you just need to incorporate your character into a Motion Graphics piece. That's the important part, since... ya know... this is a Motion Graphics course.
FYI: If you're looking to have a traditional character (humans, animals, etc.) for your animation, you can find Character Packs on the internet that will give you pre-created characters to animate in AE. Of course, the good ones you'll have to pay for since they have seperate arms, legs, facial expressions and so on, but there are some freebies out there as well that might work for you.
So to recap what I'm looking for:
- Story
- An animated character or characters (person, anthropomorphic animal, a toaster, triangles... anything, really)
- Motion Graphics in the surrounding environments or on or around the character (a smiley face that radiates more smiley faces - yeah, i know it's hokey, but it fulfills the assignment, 'k?)
- 30 seconds or longer running time
Here's some ideas to get the juices flowing...
You could do something similar to the aforementioned walk-cycle animation we created last semester and integrate that character into a rich, vibrant motion graphics laden environment where things are growing out of the walls or graphics behind the character or to reflect changes in mood or topic in a song or the dialog. You could take existing video from a movie or TV show and add googly eyes and animated mouths to the people then add motion graphics to the environment surrounding them. If you have a project from this or another class that you'd like to expand upon your initial idea by adding or enhancing a character or characters, you can do that too. In that case, I'd like to see the original from which you're starting and see what you plan to do in your storyboards.
Just remember... this is the most heavily
weighted project of the semester!
Integrate ideas you may have had for projects from last semester. Search YouTube and Vimeo for inspiration (there's TONS of examples). Go crazy with it. Do great work. Most important, have fun.
Thanks!
*The creators of South Park started off with a construction paper, stop-motion style for their pilot episode, then changed their workflow to utilize Maya (a 3D program) to create their animations while maintaining the cut-out style since the stop-motion method was way too time-consuming. There's an interesting documentary that shows their entire workflow called "6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park." Here's an article about it if you're interested.
Beware, though... it's definitely R rated, not safe for work material.
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