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Introduction
A 2D animation with a visual narrative about fighting negative feelings with hope.
Project B spanned from November 2019 to May 2020 (6 months). Its development can be divided into 2 parts: conceptualizing and animating. In the first stage, my role was to create a project management plan, as well as generate and illustrate ideas. In the second stage, I would be animating and editing.
The project had multiple goals. My main goal was to push my studying further - I needed to do something ambitious to identify my weaknesses and improve on them. I also wanted to practice implementing story elements in my work.
Olli Keinänen & Jere Viinonen, KollektiWe
"Unique and skillfully executed 2D animation with an incredibly comprehensive design document."
Design Progress
Planning
Step 1. Setting Personal Goals
This step ensured I would have the drive to work on the project even when it gets tough. As I am big on improvement, I planned this project so it would allow me to study fields I'm interested in (eg. action and story-telling) and help map out what I need to improve on next. Last, but least, I wanted to experiment with what type of work I would like to do.
Step 2. Following the Design Brief
Next, it was important to know what others want and design the project so it meets all requirements. This time the only limiting factors were the deadline and my skill level. Otherwise, I was given free hands.
Step 3. Idea storming
It was time to write down story-ideas and browse songs to animate to. I came up with about 3 pages of rough ideas, most of them related to hustle-culture.
Refining the Idea
Step 4. Refining the idea
I'd chosen a rough idea and now it was time to start molding it to the beat of the song. This took by far the longest. I had broken down the song's beats and written it visual notes. The clip I planned on using was a lot longer consisting of sections perfect for an introduction, climax, and an ending. During the refining period, I would swap between drawing concept images and writing down my ideas for each of these sections. Coming up with visually stunning, but story-wise cohesive scenes were both challenging and fun and I look forward to doing so again in the future.
Step 5. Choosing the right scenes
My teacher made a remark of how I could publish a book for all the sketches and ideas I had generated. It became progressively harder to check if the images matched the song, which meant collecting the nice ideas and forming a prototype from them.
Step 6. Feedback & Fixes
Something that I must do in the future is to give some extra love to my prototypes and draw out every scene so that other people can give feedback to if I'm hitting the right ideas. I still got insight from people whom I discussed what the project was about.
Something which helped keep a track of all the feedback ideas was to write them down in order of appearance to the song with the name of the scene.
Step 7. Problem-solving
It didn't seem wise to jump straight into animating without identifying possible problems. Along with making fixes to the script and images and simplifying it to make sure I'd save time, I went around gathering tutorials and references. This included finding visual references for the poses, elements, animations as well as finding tutorials for the program I was about to use. This step typically also includes watching "beginner mistakes" types of videos to avoid simple catastrophes.
In my case, I find it easier to problem-solve pre-emptively when I'm worried about starting something then when I'm in the action trying to make things work.
Animating
Step 8. Setting up
This step covers moving the images to the animation software, timing them to the song, and calculating a premade plan for how quickly I need to be working.
Step 9. Animating
I worked using a pose-to-pose method while utilizing as many helpers to map out the movements as I could. (For example, these could be animating a simple line to indicate how the hair will move, drawing arcs the body parts will have to follow in their in-betweens as well as using timing charts.
Once the harder parts were done, it was all down to adding in-betweens and towards the end of the project, about cleaning up the animation. I liked to listen to podcasts at this stage while working.
Bringing things to a close
Step 10. Polishing
I got to this stage on-time which granted me a good time to go back and tweak things as much as I saw fit. I could have done a lot more cleaning up then I ended up doing.
Step 11. Editing
This was the last step. It included creating motion graphics, adding effects as well as editing sounds.
Step 12. Publishing
Project B was shown to my class, teachers, reviewers before being put online.
