OUT OF YOUR HEAD
MOON SAVING
Animation
BRIEF
This project is about making a 20 seconds animation in a group of 2 or 3 students. And we need to choose five words from the Word Cloud and make them into a complete story. So my team mate is Yanbin Wang, and the five words we chose are moon, star, forest, castle and evil. We connected them into a very simple story, which is the moon be caught by an evil and castle-like monster, the star came to save the moon. Finally them defeated that monster. The whole story was happened in a forest.
Our animation doesn’t contain a lot of different kinds of animation, it’s just 2D digital animation but we tried our best to focus on the frames of the animation in order to show the story. Yanbin was responsible for the main animation and the sound, I was responsible for the background, a small part of the animation and the editing.
As the background is my part which include the design of the castle-like monster, I first thought about how to make that monster like a castle. Yanbin and I discussed about this for a long time, at the beginning we just made it look like an ordinary castle, but we thought that was so boring and hard to draw into animation. The final decision is reference to a draft by Yoh Yoshinari. His draft is about a tower which is twisty. That gave us ideas of how to design our castle-like monster. And after that I did the part of the animation which connects the two great part animation that Yanbin did. And then we start final editing, I made all the frames together into 20 seconds with Premiere, Yanbin added the sound effects into the animation. At that moment, we still had one week left, and Luca gave us a lot of suggestions, such as speed up or slow down some of frames. So we tried our best to add more effects and changed some of the frames so that the animation can make more sense.
I am really lucky to work with Yanbin on this project. He did a very great job, much better than mine. His frames work really well, which really show the atmosphere. And the explosion at the end really impressive, it’s even better than I imaged at the beginning of this project. He really spent a lot of times on drawing these frames. To be honest when he first showed me what he had drawn after our discussion, I was amazed by his work and that also pushed me to work harder. Although Yanbin was not satisfied with his works, it turned out very well when we edited them in to the animation. I have to thank Yanbin for his work on this project.
SOME OF MY WORKS
STORYBOARD
REFLECTION
This project cost us a lot of effort and time, both of us tried our best. We do believe it is a complete animation, however there are still some regrets that the final effects don’t reach the level we wants. For example, some parts of the animation, especially some of my parts, they are just animated not animation. I really felt my lack on the skills of drawing animation, include the frame and the action of the characters. I have to spend more times on practicing these parts. And due to Yanbin and I have different drawing styles, it’s a little bit weird that the style changes in the animation. It is obvious to see. Besides, the 20 seconds rule is also a kind of problem. We are very lucky that after we editing our animation can be end at exactly 20 seconds. We can show our story completely to the audiences. However, there should be more time to heighten atmosphere, there should be more time to describe some parts of what happened much more clearly. I mean although the story is completed, to those audiences who are watching it for the first time, it may be too fast, and they cannot understand what exactly happens. But this problem gave us the experience of how to divide the time of the animation within a required time. This is important for making an animation impresses the audiences.
All in all, thanks to my teammate Yanbin for his fantastic works. Although there is still some problems of the final animation, I think this team project works very well. It made me have more passion for animation. And I hope I can work with Yanbin Wang again in the future.
You can download my PDF about this project here