Animation

Hi! And welcome to my Animation page! Here you will find animations I've either made or contributed to as a student studying animation. Also, I've decided to include some of my Flip Notes to liven up the page. Enjoy!

These animations were created with the assistance of the following software: [Adobe After Effects; Procreate; Adobe Animate(Flash); Flip-A-Clip; Stop Motion iOS; Krita; Adobe Premiere Pro; Flip Note Studio 3D; etc]

These pieces were produced from: Winter 2017 - Fall 2022

24 Hour Animation Contest

The work below comes from my entries into Siggraph's 24 hour animation contest.

Team - Team Titans

"Automation"

Fall 2022

So, for the 24hr contest held by Siggraph, I contributed to the team, Team Titans! Competing this year was super fun, I joined my friend Lizzie's team, where I was introduced to, Alex, Amarii, and Sophie. We got our prompt: "What will humanities' future look like in 100 years", and began circling ideas, shaping an image for our future world. We eventually decided to depict a "Robo-Future", in which humanity is enslaved by robots and now performs the lackluster tasks of household appliances, for our purposes a Roomba!

Knowing we'd need to demonstrate a shift to this new world, we were interested in using the media (i.e., advertisements and news) to show change over time. This is where my contributions begin, as I animated a news broadcast, showing anchors, and footage of nuclear warfare beginning. My teammates were incredibly swift and creative, ultimately designing a distinct setting for our story, our humans and robots as characters, and keeping a lighthearted atmosphere of productivity. My work continued in sound design, where I mixed and captured the audio for our animation. I played a simple bassline, distorted some of our chatter working with a cassette player (used for the news chatter), and created a booming explosion mixing dropped textbooks, the sounds of a nuke exploding in old test footage, and a royalty free thud/boom effect. Creating the sound for this project was fun and helped me immensely with my next work compositing and editing the final cut of our project. Ultimately, I incorporated working in both After Effects and Premiere Pro in the editing phase, and even created an additional explosion shot (with spare animation and art) to show the destruction of our setting. I used some masks, color keying, and transparencies to align our individual artwork and animation, and connected them to create our timeline of events. In the end, we submitted with a measly 15 minutes remaining, and felt the relief of a job well done.

Team - LM before Fame

"The Dawn"

Fall 2021

In Fall of 2021, I decided to enter the 24-hour animation contest for the first time. Somewhat last minute, me and a couple of my peers formed a team in the Siggraph Discord. We jokingly named ourselves "LM to Fame", poking fun at our last-minute entry.

Arriving I met 4 hard working animation students, with experience in both 2D and 3D work. We decided to focus on this for our presentation of the prompt: "What will our future look like leaving Covid19 and returning to the world". We ultimately decided to focus on a simple execution, of a Zoom class ending for running out of power, and showing our student leave his room to go out into nature. My classmates split up, one team focusing on the modeling of the room, and one team designing our 2D animation's look and movement. I used my experience in video editing to create a solution to combining 2D and 3D animation, later compositing the footage in After Effects. Then I decided on the camera angles for our scene, shot reference footage, and using the two, our animators began work. My contributions for animation were shots of our character rotation, paying attention to solid drawing; Shots where our character interacts with objects and elements that where on different layers; and our character's call to action, the bird that lands on the window seal. In compositing, I brought these elements together to tell our story. Sometimes, our character would be behind elements in the background, where I would incorporate a mask to reinforce the illusion. The project final came together with my title graphic, and sound sourced from our school's audio library (I believe they're originally from adobe). Overall, this experience was a powerful one for me, and I owe our success to my incredible teammates who worked together well and powered on through the night!

My Work in Animation Prior to College

The next section of work comes from my experiences at WBHS9, my high school's television station where I was hired as a paid intern. These pieces show my introduction to animation, and how I learned about animation without any formal education.

"02:00"

Winter 2017

02:00 was my first piece of animation for WBHS9, and I was eager to show off as I've been making stop motion animation since I was a little kid. I actually caught the flu while making this project and charged on to finish it on time despite being sick. Looking back, I'm still proud of this for what it is, and it began a path towards Animation that I'm still on today. This little stop motion was even nominated for my high school's Madison Awards ceremony.

"Arin's Gambling Addiction"

Arin's Gambling Addiction is an animation I made for a competition in the spring of 2019. This project was my first long form 2D animation piece, and at the time I didn't know too much about Adobe Animate. I had to learn quickly, and this little project was a great opportunity for me. It went on to be nominated for a NATAS award and was entered into some other state competitions as well, taking home a Blue Spark Award from MTSU where I now study Animation. This project was very important for me and I'm glad to be able to share it here.

2D Animation at MTSU

The next pieces were created in the spring of 2021 and are posted in chronological order from start to finish. You will see many of the basics of animation here including Walk Cycles, Bouncing Balls, Flipbooks, and Stop Motion.

"Drip" Flipbook

Spring 2021