I am currently working on my first animation, and it is a 2D one. It's been interesting to see what the process of animating can look like head on, and being able to create my own animation, simple as it may be, has been a pretty good experience so far. But you never really know how much effort goes into an animation until you have to animate something yourself. It's been eye-opening for me to think that a simple ten-second animation takes so much more time and is so much more tedious than I realized before. For ten seconds we had to create 120 cels in Illustrator, so I can see why longer animated clips or movies usually need a team of animators. The animation we are working on is a fundamental just to get us practicing the animation techniques we learned about in class before. I've been working on the squash and stretch technique the most, and at first it can seem confusing as to how you think it should look, but when you give yourself a different perspective and think about how gravity works, it's fairly easy to get the hang of it. Although the process can be tedious, I still will feel rewarded after creating my first 2D animation.
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About a day ago Riot Games put out a new cinematic for the game League of Legends, Awaken. The League of Legends Youtube account has been very successful when it comes to videos such as this, pulling in sometimes over a hundred million views. So what makes up these animations, specifically the most recent? Well, to put it simply, a large budget, but when it comes down to the process of making the animations you can clearly see the amount of effort put into even a single frame. League's most successful cinematics seem to be the music videos, so I'll be focusing on how they incorporate motion and music in a cohesive manner because this is what makes them so engaging to watch. Something noteworthy about the Awaken animation especially is the stunning visuals. Pairing the detailed artwork and smooth animation together, you can only imagine how big of a team and how much work it would take to finish even a few minute long animation. Since this animation is centered around action, there must be attention put into fight choreography. This is where storyboarding and the pre-production phase of animation counts the most (in my opinion). The music and beat correlates really nicely with the choreography of the fight in their music videos, and if a team of animators can't properly think preconstruct or execute the choreography to match the sound, it can really make or break an animation, and Awaken uses the song in its favor. In Summary:
2D animation has a pretty straight forward title, so you probably already know the premise of this post by looking at the title. This type of animation is quite relevant to me and the other students in my course because we will soon be learning how to take what we have have been learning recently in Illustrator into our own animation. I am really interested in this aspect of media and design and have been waiting for this lesson because it literally puts the information we know into motion. It will be interesting to really break down how 2D animators create so much movement in their work just using 2D imagery. unlike what we've been doing so far, in order to successfully create animation we will need to have an eye for the process of movement and not just one still image. As you most likely can guess animation takes time because you need to create many images to make even one smooth motion, so we will definitely need to take advantage of as much of our in class work time as we can. When we think about the creativity aspect, this will not only be how you can create an interesting storyline,but also being able to make an animation that isn't too short for the story so it feels rushed, but not too long so the people watching lose interest. Since we will most likely not have the time to make long animations we will have to focus on what storyline can be interesting, but also not take too long to tell. Animators have to deal with this type of decision making all the time. Sometimes we can overlook the design aspect of animation in which we have to recognize what will make our animation more or less appealing. These are all things 2D animators take into account, and of what I'm sure we will be learning about soon.
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About meI am a Senior at DSA and currently taking the Advanced Game Art and Design course. I enjoy playing video games and drawing in my free time. The opinions expressed within this blog are my own, and do not reflect that of Durham School of the Arts of Durham Public Schools Archives
May 2022
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