Character Development

How have you been? I've been doing good. Great actually, because I've got some pretty big news. So in January I applied to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama and I found out a couple days ago I received a full academic scholarship! It's really exciting :) I get to go for a whole week, we sleep there and everything. I want to say thank you my amazing teachers Mr. Sanderl (he teaches this GT class :), Mrs. Vedder (my awesome Algebra teacher), and Mrs. Bandsma (she was the one who really got me excited about science!) who all wrote really nice letters of recommendation for me. I love you guys! Oh and I guess I kind of like you viewers too... just kidding you're all great ;) But on to what this post is actually about...
ANIMATION! ANIMATION! ANIMATION! ANIMATION! ANIMATION!  That's right folks: Animation! Hope you enjoy!

So for this first half of the quarter we will be working on animation. Right now we are working on a .GIF to practice the animation skills in Photoshop, but eventually we will form teams to create an animation video that focuses on our personal idiosyncrasies. If I had to define myself as a person, I would say that I'm confident, passionate, and very dramatic. However, I also get mad fairly easily because of those things. I'm also a perfectionist, especially when it comes to my school work, which can make it hard to get things done  quickly (cleaning my room is a nightmare because everything has to be absolutely perfect before I move on to my other chores).

My body after it was cut out of the picture...

Me in front of the studio green screen. 

For our animation project I am going to mainly focus on my dramatic side through my actions and how I handle different situations (I've always been pretty dramatic, however thanks to all of those summers spent at acting camp when I was younger definitely developed that further). My character in our animation will get irritated quickly. She will also kind of blow things out of proportion and make things that happen that aren't that huge of a deal to be the end of world as we know it. I think that the exaggerated theatrics of my character will make the audience laugh :)

MY GIF YAY

So I've always enjoyed animation and this quarter we are learning to use the Puppet Warp tool to animate in Photoshop. But as always when learning something new, there is bound to be some bumps in the road. On the week we were making our GIF animations I was working on another project for Hiki No and didn't get much time in class to work on it. It all turned out fine in the end, but that was a difficult week :). In order to create our GIF animations, we all had to take pictures in front of our Morning News studio green screen. Then we opened the images in Photoshop and used the Quick Selection tool to make cutouts of our bodies. After that we used the Puppet Warp tool to manipulate our bodies and move them across the stage. In my GIF, I slide into the frame, stop, and then shoot upward. I know, it's just so impressive and complicated. No, not really, but I'm am okay with the way it turned out considering it was my first go at it. However, I love the background on it because it is a picture I took while I was hiking with my mom (Hi mommy!).

Well, that's all for this post, but I will be posting again soon. Bye byeee!