Topic Two: Assignment #4

September 26, 2018

Topic Two: Assignment #4

Quadrant:

I was in group C, so I had to pick a top right corner to use.

Deciding what to do:

I really only had one corner that was usable, so I needed to figure out what I was going to do. I tried to look at the quadrant from different viewpoints: what a child would see, what an adult would see, what an elder person would see, and ultimately I couldn't decide on one of them. That was what inspired the animation, and became the meaning behind the images the chair morphs into.

The next step was the flesh out the meaning, and make sure it all tied together. I wanted to carry the chair into the story by sketching the ways people are physically supported from the ground throughout their life.

The chair:

The fetus:

I decided the birth canal was the best option that could transform back and forth from the chair. I created the lineart, considering how the chair would morph into the birth canal. I also wanted it to be simple enough to look abstract unless you consider it with the rest of the animation, and from the viewpoint of a baby that doesn't have much experience with life.

The womb holds the unborn child and supports it. That's the only chair it's ever known.

The baby:

This was the idea that actually inspired the combining of the different interpretations. I wanted the crib to look big, rounded, and simple enough to show what the baby would focus on (the mobile). Of course, the lines had to work with the chair for the transformation to work.

The crib supports the baby that can't sit down.

The child:

I wanted to use the negative space from the chair for one of the transformations, and I saw tree branches around the chair. I thought that in the child phase, it would be the one to look outside of the box and interpret the chair quadrant as something completely outside of what was drawn.

The swing is a fun way to literally be supported off the earth.

Adulthood:

All of adulthood is one chair. It's just a simple chair to show the lack of creativity in the adult phase as the chair transforms into a very similar, simple chair.

The breaking chair:

The final few transitions to the chair are not going back to normal, they're going back to a red distorted chair as the figurative character is dying/getting weaker.

The eye:

Finally, forgetting the chairs, the eye takes it's last two blinks and the person dies.

The chair is back:

The chair grows back again and the cycle starts again (and loops endlessly).

Connecting the sections, AKA, Animating:

There were over 130 individual drawings that, when looped back, resulted in over 260 frames in the final animation. I used Paint Tool SAI (which doesn't have any built in animation options) to draw each individual frame and manually onion skin the layers. Each frame was saved and numbered individually and I compiled them into http://gifmaker.me/ and saved the file as a video. The speed is 120 milliseconds.

I drew pose-to-pose so that the sections of the animation morphed smoothly and accurately.