Animated Life Lessons

It's almost the end of the year and for our second to last project (before the music videos) we are now currently doing another GT staple: animations! For this particular project though, we couldn't use an simple animation program, like Stykz. We instead have to use ourselves as marionettes in Photoshop using puppet warp, a feature in Photoshop which allows us to do so. But because we were using ourselves in the animation we had to exaggerate our own self perceived flaws and my teammates (Kasiah and Kaz) and I really struggled on this particular step. We eventually came up with clumsy, defensive, fiery and loud and we based off our animated characters flaws on these terms.

In our animation we kind of try to emphasize the flaws that we came up with and the animation kind of turned into a comical and childish squabble. The best comparison I can come with is a pair of little kids insulting each other over something really small and dumb, like a toy or the matter of which color is the best! (for me it's totally green) .   In the animation we use really child-ish insults and since Kaz and I are arguing over the matter of OverStory and Isaac Galaxy (spin-offs of Under Tale and Steven Universe) we use kindergarten level insults like Galaxy-head and Story-face. (pretty scalding burns eh?)

One of the prominent requirements of this project was the composition of our team, which needed to be with people whom we never worked with before. Working with Kaz and Kasiah was pretty interesting considering we never worked together and our productivity was fairly good! Although I'd say that we struggled a lot on the format of the animation that was our only option: PUPPET WARP! There was a lot of inherent problems with the application, but the one thing that grated on me the most was how puppet warp made you look extremely limp and fake, but I learned to maneuver around that with a LOT of mistakes in the span of a lot of frustrating days! But it was all worth it, because everything we did was needed for the best part of the whole project: COMPLETION! Gotta admit though, the second chance that our teacher gave us to improve on our animation was much better than the one that was really RUSHED! Check out the ugly before and polished after below...