Bailey MeCey

Reading & Writing

As the semester comes to a close, we finish off with Animated Storytelling by focusing on how to get your animation seen. Thanks to the internet, your animation can be seen all over the world. However, that also means you are competing with others for the audience’s attention. For a theatrical animation, a film festival is an important way to get your animation out there. To ensure it gets seen, it’s necessary to package your animation with the right title logo and still, synopsis with a hook, tag, and director’s bio. This allows for the festival organizers to get a brief overview of the animation to help your chances of getting selected. How your story was created and the influences behind it are also fantastic to highlight.

Where to show your film is also important, whether that is a festival or putting it out on YouTube. Even then, there are certain subsections in online communities that your film might excel in better than others. From there, connecting with the audience and your peers can help with networking for your film. A connection you make might help you down the road, and people will remember you if you provide support for their work. Networking can happen in digital spaces, as well as in person. Once you have built the audience, teasing your net project with them can help build hype and provide proper feedback.

Once your project is complete and you have shared it, the temptation to take a long break may come to you. While a rest to recover the creative mind is necessary, once the idea for a production returns you must jump into it. However, the cycle must begin with pre-production then production.

Overall, I enjoyed reading Animated Storytelling and how it helped to contribute to the work I have done in the course. While the book is best for those that are looking to create theatrical animations, there was a lot that I can you for my professional career. The best aspect I learned was the importance of pre-production, as it allows for the production to have the proper foundation. Without that, it is easy for a production to go off the rails.

Research

To go along with the module, I collected a variety of examples that present advanced forms of animations. These animations range from classic television advertisements to feature film introductions.

Given it’s the spooky season, I have been watching through the Mike Flanagan horror series The Haunting of Hill House. The introduction uses motion and sound in fantastic ways, and how it moves from the statues, the model house, to the red door.

This Apple advertisement for the iPod uses chroma keying to make a silhouette of the figures with a solid color background. While the figures are in black, the iPod and headphone cords are white to make them stand out. The ad has fun energy with the upbeat music that makes it stand out.

For Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the intro sequence begins with the Warner Bros. logo as the camera dollies in on Harry’s house. The way the film title matches the light from the house helps it connect and not feel like two separate entities. Also, The slight movement of the letters for the logo helps to not make it feel static.

Create

For this module, I wanted to create an animation that also incorporates a logo animation. I recently started a new job at a public charter school in Bridgeport, and one of the materials I was given was a one-pager covering the background, goals, and vision of the school. From this, I adapted the material into a 30-second animation that covers the main topics. The animation has a lot of movement and uses multiple techniques I have developed throughout the class.

In addition, I created a logo animation for the end of the project. It uses the squash and stretch principle as the logo falls into place. For audio, I found a background music track that supports the animation. It is upbeat but does not overshadow the animation. Several of the animations have motion blur to give them a sense of speed.