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“Stephen & Cooper” ~ Moving Day

Final animation ready to show!

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“Storyboards: Version 2 ~ Notebook Thumbnails”

I have a small notebook that I would take with me around campus when the time came in the fall semester to draw my ideas for storyboards in thumbnails and frames.

All of these pages are drawn using Faber Castell ink pens, and shaded in pencil. I recolored them in Photoshop to see how the environments would look with a limited color palate: autumn colors in the day, and dark blue for the night.

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Camera Operations using After Effects:

After importing a PSD (Photoshop Document) as a composition into After Effects, I can add the Virtual 3D Camera to give awesome and believably realistic movements and effects.

After converting the layers into 3D, using key-frames allows me to animate specific camera functions:

Increasing / decreasing the aperture

Changing the angle of the camera

I parent the camera onto a null object labeled DOLLY to act as a moving tripod to animate camera movements with.

Here is the final result on Vimeo.

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“Camera Focus ~ Blur”

For this shot of Cooper, I expanded the aperture for After Effect’s awesome virtual 3D camera to give depth to the scene.

I wanted the camera to focus on Cooper as it zooms closer into his face. The background blurs ever so subtlety with this film-making technique for the audience to pay closer attention to Cooper smiling at the boy in this important scene.

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“Compositing in After Effects~ Swing Scene”

Here’s a look into making one of the closing shots. Layering the boy Stephen swinging and his dog Cooper together with the background are composited in After Effects. Along with a 3D camera, background elements are separated in 3D space, and the footage drawn in graphite and rendered in black and white are converted into the monochromatic autumn color-scheme.

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“Background Drawing Process”

While backgrounds, still frames, and character animation is drawn in graphite pencil for both the outlining and shading, additional rendering in Photoshop offers greater control over the visual articulation of a shot, offering experimentation and additional elements that can make an image more powerful after it is scanned.

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"Layering Drawings for Animation & Illustration”

Photoshop is a great tool to generate finished pictures using layering in your creative drawing process, for both working with traditional media as well as digitally.

Character stills and animation is separate from background to offer greater control over compositional adjustments, retouching and layer-building, and the final pass with lens mask and glowing color effects in After Effects.

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“Vimeo & YouTube Title Card ~ Test“

Layered above a rendered drawing, text is hand-written using sharpies, and recolored in Photoshop.

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Animation Process #1: Filler

A still from my character animation. I’m using my brush to add a filler to separate the transparent multiplied layers of the animation from the background for the composite.

Animation Process #2: Background

A line-art drawing using graphite pencil on Bristol Board, multiplied on top of the textured filler with value and lighting effects in Photoshop.

Animation Process #3: Final Composite

The animation is layered together with background elements in After Effects, with a monochromatic night-time blue using color balance, and a lens mask for the edges.

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Thesis Journal: “A Boost In Confidence”

It is possible to make your stories come alive and achieve your creative dreams through classically traditional 2D animation. Are you willing to take the step to try something that seems overwhelmingly challenging and make something great, unique to your imagination, and your artistic voice? That’s something I’ve learned sticking to my guns going through the completion of my first animation short film. The knowledge I have gained from reading books about traditional animation, storytelling, and fine art back before high-school stuck with me in my mind. In my college experience, the manifestation of my vision going at it on the animation table at home was a huge challenge. It was a long haul for the past three months taking the visuals from my storyboards and animatic into my hand-drawn animation sequences. But in the end I proved to myself that I can make a traditionally animated short film, and it is absolutely a life-changing experience for me and a huge confidence-booster. I’m soaring in the clouds right now! But it’s only the beginning. I will tell you that the animation process is not as hard as many make it out to be, in experience or in fear. Like this thumbnail sketch I did a year ago, you can capture your dreams, your creative ideas and your goals, and unleash them into your world in such a way that you can make a life-long career out of what you love. It has been a wonderful opportunity to begin my career with my last MICA project. Be encouraged, and don’t freak out (!), it is possible.

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Artist Statement:

For my thesis, I was inspired by happy memories from my childhood in the state of Maryland, and its beautiful countryside. My animated short film explores the relationship with Cooper, my big loving red husky.

A 6 year old boy and his family move into a new home. Stephen, the little boy, with the help of Cooper overcomes the excitement, stress, and fears of living in a new environment. The story is told through the boy’s eyes, and shows how both him, and his dog, discover a new happiness while exploring the world around them, playing games and venturing into the hills and fields.

My short film captures the emotions of the boy discovering a new environment, and I hope that the audience will feel touched and moved by it.

As a teenager, I came across “The Illusion Of Life” by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, two of the “Nine Old Men” at the Walt Disney Studios. I was moved and deeply touched seeing their beautiful drawings. The characters were so vividly animated that they seemed to come alive. I could feel their emotions. That is why I wanted to animate my story as a traditional 2D animated film, using pencil and graphite. Then I scanned the frames and assembled them in Adobe After Effects, and exported to Premiere Pro for final compositing.

The combination of sound and animated images have the power to impact the viewers in such a magical way that is makes dialogue almost unnecessary, and that is what I would love to achieve as an artist.

Change doesn’t have to be scary! It can be a good thing.

“Be happy while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth.” Ecclesiastes 11:9

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“Storyboards: Version 1 ~ Early Story Development”

These loose, cleaned up drawings on index cards were my inspiration that lead to the creation of “Stephen & Cooper: Moving Day,” the story about moving into the large and beautiful home in Hagerstown, MD.

At the Maryland Institute College of Art, I had a great storyboard class with traditional animator and independent filmmaker William Hartland, and past mid-term in the fall we had an assignment to create a story from a childhood memory.

In this version of the story, my parents are included as I am helping them unload the boxes from our moving truck. I still had in these boards the feeling of getting used to the new environment and reacting to the scale of the rooms indoors, with my Mom being the one who came to check on me. While tucking me in, she reads a story.

I also have the morning come where I’m getting up and admiring the scenery outdoors from my bedroom window. I skip down the stairs feeling happy, and after breakfast, my Mom helps me with my homework for Kindergarten. Then I’m free to play with my wooden toy trains on the living room floor, and sit on the swing out on the wrap-around porch before lunch.

This is possibly my favorite of the assignments I had in the illustration department. If I had more time with Thesis I would like to have included more of the original storyboard visuals. They are quite beautiful, and at the time, it got me going on working toward building more stories from my early childhood.

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"A Seaside Fantasy” ~ Sequential Art

Select panels from my Sequential Art Class 14 page final.

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Color Studies ~ Environments

These thumbnails were rendered in graphite. I used Hue & Saturation with Color Balance in Photoshop's adjustments to play with the mood of each scene. At mid-day, the landscapes will have autumn colors, and at night they will be in blue.

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"Open Sketchbook ~ Cooper: Anatomy Studies”

I made these drawings of wolves and a fox to get a feel of body structure when I was practicing dog anatomy for drawing Cooper. When the darkened shoulders and the hips were separated from the rest of the body, it is easier to think of them as sculpted disks that shift back and forth as the dog walks. I also found that shading of the neck, back, shoulders and hips uses light to visually articulate the structure of the body.

I was thinking about dots and lines when drawing the paws, knee joints, and ankles on the hind-feet. This method would be very easy to animate frame by frame, so I could focus more on the movement of these simple but visually descriptive shapes. Then I can add the hair and fur later as I go along with other details once the groundwork of the movement of the character is laid out first.

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“Open Sketchbook ~ Cooper: Action Drawing”

I was looking at a lot of exercise drawings at the library and online of dogs, some I found from Disney and wildlife books. Making these sketches really helped me try out being able to draw quickly as warm-ups for animating, while exploring the power of the line of action and capturing the raw energy of my husky Cooper various dynamic poses.

I drew the thumbnails on top trying to place the paws in perspective, according to how Cooper would walk if animated, to then running, and having a nap! That drawing I touched up with a Photoshop brush, one I’d like to make into a finished rendered drawing.

The next panel has Cooper in three running poses for keyframes. The line of action helped me give a graceful arc to his body, and work it into his poses for that extra punch of power as he sprints.

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"Stephen & Cooper" Animation Test ~ Camera Focus

Here is the first animation test! I am very happy with how this is working. This is a huge breakthrough as I am finally getting really into making good animation. See process in video description.