Animation Projects
In the animation assignment, students create a short movie using Adobe Animate CC. When writing about their animation projects, students explain the creative rationale underpinning graphic design choices (e.g. color scheme, typeface choices, and consistency of graphic elements). They also reflect on the project workflow, describe frustrations encountered along the way, and explain the steps they took to solve those problems. To view examples of these creative reflections, visit the animations page on the class blog for the Fall 2018 section of this course. Some of these animations were created for other courses. Rachel Lopez created "You F-----s Were Asking For This One" as a directed study project in Spring 2019, Blake Frampton created "The Waiting Game" as a directed study project in Spring 2018, and Al Huffman created "Being Asexual in a Sexual World" as her senior Capstone thesis. Al Huffman's animation was supervised by Professor Jennifer Henderson. (This page was last updated on December 2, 2019.)
The Outsider
Details: Inspired by the song "The Outsider" by Marina and The Diamonds, this video tells the story of a blue cat (named Nebula by their owner) and an unnamed owner who only appears for a short time. The key characters are the blue cat and an unnamed owner. Subdued colors convey a sort of listless, greyed-out feeling, showing why the cat isn't really enjoying their situation.
Green Fairy
Details: Nick named this animation "Green Fairy" in reference to the nickname for absinthe that the French used for some time. This animation is inspired by strange and psychedelic sequences from "Yellow Submarine" and animated films by Ralph Bakshi. Nick adds, "The muted brown of the barstool and the burgundy background were chosen to mimic a kind of velvet-strewn French aesthetic that comes to my mind when I think of artists drinking absinthe."
Snow Day: A Puppy Story
Details: Set to a wintry jazz piece performed by Kevin MacLeod, "Snow Day" is a story of a puppy enjoying life at home and outside on a snowy day in winter. Friends and family gather together, and our puppy happily greets them all. Upon hearing the door bell, signalling another arrival, our pup races to see who has come to visit, and then slips through the doorway to take a flying leap into the fresh snow.
You F----s Were Asking For This One
Details: Rachel explains, 'This animation is a music video of sorts for Rav's "You Fuckers Were Asking For This One" with added intro and outro samples from Ljones's "Soul Below." Rav is an independent hip-hop rapper, and his and his bandmate Kill Bill: The Rapper's music have gotten me through some stressful times. This song in particular was one of the first of theirs that I listened to. For the most part, the animation simply features direct interpretations of the lyrics. However, I also use the stark contrast of black and white and bits of somewhat unsettling imagery to highlight Rav's focus on mental health.'
An Unexpected Enemy
Details: Inspired by Alan Becker's legendary stick figure animations, "An Unexpected Enemy" depicts two stick figures walking into a train station with one of them suddenly attacking the other unsuccessfully only to be killed by the other before he jumps on a train to escape. All of the graphical assets in this animation were created by hand in Adobe Animate using the brush and symbols options.
TransBOREmers
Details: Ever since the release of the 'Transfomers Classics' toy line and the 20th anniversary DVD release of the 1986 movie, Chris Knecht has been fascinated by the transforming robots. This short clip recreates a scene from the 'classic' movie.
Fire Boy and Water Girl
Details: "Fire Boy and Water Girl" tells the story of a boy and a girl who gets transported into the video game that they play. Mysteriously the TV glows brighter and brighter and sucks them to a new world. Inside the game, Fire Boy’s arrogance towards his abilities in the game lead to his downfall.
Give Me A Quest
Details: Give Me A Quest ” is an animated D&D story that follows a brutish orc and a happy-go-lucky gnome as they try to complete a quest in a mountainous dungeon. The light mischievous-sounding fantasy music is borrowed from Filu and Dina, and character voice-overs are provided by Daniel Matthewson and Christian Martinez.
Boyterfly
Details: My movie, titled Boyterfly, is about a boy and some butterflies on a path. The butterflies land on the boy and then he transforms into a butterfly himself, leaving the audience to question whether this is some sort of perpetual cycle.
Paint
Details: According to Carly, "Paint is about a group of three ants that find a couple of paint cans, get the idea to knock them over, and then run through the paint to make an abstract piece of art. I decided to follow through with this story because the weekend we were creating our storyboard’s, I spent many hours in the painting studio for my painting class. This led me to brainstorm how something can interact with paint other than physically picking up a paintbrush and painting, and eventually I settled on an ants."
Focus
Details: Titled Focus, my animation centers upon a student constantly becoming distracted in class. These distractions include a bumblebee flying around and classmate noises such as a tapping pencil and a buzzing phone. The key characters in Focus are the professor, a dog usually faced away from the screen, and a dark purple cat, the struggling student. In terms of art direction, I was primarily inspired by the style of the characters from Night in the Woods (NITW), one of my favorite indie games of all time, and from Caravan Palace‘s Lone Digger music video (cartoon violence and slight nudity warning).
Portal
Details: Portal is about getting lost in smart phone technology. This topic fit with Katy Freeman's senior art portfolio, which discusses smart phone and social media’s impact on people’s social experiences. To keep the aesthetic of the animation consistent with here other artwork, Katy drew all of the graphics by hand on Animate CC. The main character is a figure that turns her phone on and then shrinks to a smaller version of herself that falls through one end of the phone and out the other. Another figure exists in the beginning and end of the animation, but has no other identifying characteristics except for anonymous silhouette. These figures and main theme of getting absorbed in a smart phone are inspired mostly by friends, family and my own use of smart phones. (Note: This animation can only be viewed with the Flash plug-in.)
Being Asexual In A Sexual World
Details: Al Huffman created this video as her senior project in the Communication Capstone Seminar in Spring 2018. She crafted a narrative with one asexual main character communicating what it is like to be asexual in a sexual normative society to a second asexual person who experiences the world completely differently as she is more romantic. Al says, "my goals for this project include demystifying some of the misconceptions about identifying as Asexual Aromantic through an illustrative, notoriously stereotypical medium, an animated cartoon. The film is intended to be subtly educational concerning the asexual experience and community without being patronizing, focusing more on the person than the identity through narrative dialogue." Visit Al's personal portfolio to learn more about this project. (Note: Al's project was supervised by Dr. Jennifer Henderson.)
The Vacation
Details: The Vacation tells the story of a bored ghost who decides to go on holiday to the beach. Annie used a for a two-dimensional look inspired by the Dumb Ways to Die franchise. "For my color scheme, I wanted to include lots of dark colors for the ghost’s dreary home setting and routine," says Annie. "I juxtaposed these darker colors with the bright, bubblegum colors of the beach scene, which is also shown in the title and end cards. I created everything in the animation by hand because I really enjoy drawing in Adobe Animate, and felt that I had a good grip on using the drawing tools."
Tale of Tread and Dragon
Details: Brian writes, "This animation tells a fairy tale. A dragon descended into a small down and opened a shop. The young dragon later falls in love with a man and went after him to the war. By doing the animation project, I learned a lot more about how scenes and programs work. This later helped me create my first game in this class."
Fire and Flames Duel
Details: Fire and Flames Duel depicts two guitarists having a musical duel on a volcano, and features hand-drawn symbols used for the characters. The song that the guitarists are playing along to is called “Through the Fire and Flames by DragonForce.
The Waiting Game
Details: Blake created this animation with Adobe Character Animator in Spring 2018.
Heavy Metal Band
Details: Heavy Metal depicts a high school metal band practicing in their garage. Their jam session going through "Chop Suey!" by System of a Down (from their album Toxicity) is interrupted by one of the members’ mom coming into the garage and rudely offering cookies to the band. How dare she?! The animation suggests the vibe of a spooky metal music video.
Chicxulub (Part 2)
Details: This animation is a continuation of Rachel's story about a star who was lonely in space and decided to make earth friends. The story is named after the comet, Chicxulub, that made dinosaurs go extinct. Rachel writes, "stars are simple and cute, so I wanted to focus my story on a star. That is when I thought of the comet that made dinosaurs go extinct, and I decided to create a comical explanation for why that happened."
A Rainy Day
Details: This animation conveys the idea that people can make the best out of negative situations if they are willing to make the effort. Leah writes, "I decided to tell this story, because I really like sunflowers and wanted to incorporate them into my animation. By providing the character of the young girl and this story line, I was able to create something colorful and fun, while also sending a message about positivity."
Lost Cub
Details: Kali writes, "I chose a story of a lost tiger cub finding his way back home because I thought it would be cute to use a binocular mask to show the tiger waking up, and I also thought it would be a fun story to make the tiger walk through multiple stages interacting with multiple animals along the way."
Panic at the Disco
Details: Julia explains, 'I wanted to make this animation because I love 70’s music, and I knew it would be funny to make an animation that played off the words of a cheesy disco song. I chose “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps as my song, because I thought it would be funny to play off the lyrics “burn, baby, burn.”' Julia picked the graphic elements to match the theme of a classroom, selecting bright colors that fit with the 1970s theme.
Seafarer
Details: Jesus writes, "The name of my animation is Seafarer and it was inspired by an old melody I had written during my first-year here at Trinity University. For the majority of my life, music has always been a recurring “visual” that brings out the story teller within me, so when trying to think of what I wanted to animate and create, I knew right away that music would help me come up with something... [T]he melody that created the story for Seafarer came from me simply messing around on the piano and if you were to ask me what I notes I played I would not be able to tell you at all because I do not know, I simply know that the notes I played created a melody so vivid that I could see an entire movie scene being played out in my head every time I played it."
The Duel
Details: According to Joel, 'The concept for my animation came from a quick-draw minigame I played as a child when I played “Kirby Nightmare in Dreamland” The game involved a sunset, a grassy landscape, and a wind blowing sound effect. After a random amount of time an exclamation mark would appear and the player must quickly press the “A” button in order to out-draw their opponent, beating the level. The difficulty in hitting the button at the right time increased with the levels until the final encounter. I named my animation “Duel” as that was what the minigame entailed.'
The Ticket
Details: Houston says, "My inspiration for “The Ticket” came in the midst of a crippling bout of creative block one morning, immediately after throwing out my first idea that barely made it onto a storyboard before I decided it’d be no fun. I ran into an epiphany while absent-mindedly browsing jokes on Reddit." Commenting on the production process, he explains, "I spent a total of probably four hours just experimenting, using trial and error, and figuring out by process of elimination what the best method would be to make these cars work the way I want... By the end of the process, I understood much better how Animate treats layers, symbols, clips, and scenes relative to one another. I ended up with separate symbols for the wheels, body, and both combined for each car in each direction. So, on the bright side, I’ll never have to be so confused again now that I finally know what to do."
Monster In My Closet
Details: According to Jenni, this animation was inspired by Halloween, a fondness for horror films, and an interest in experimenting with light in Adobe Animate. She adds, "From COMM-2302 and just having seen horror-related things so often, it is known that colors like very saturated red or dark reds are often used over black or grey backgrounds to really stand out. So, I of course went along with that horror color-scheme in order to send a message right from the title that it was fitting that genre (alongside a blinking eyeball in the “o” of “Monster” of course). I downloaded horror-related fonts from daFont so that my text on my title and ending screen matched with the animation, and I used several different sound effects that were all-horror related, such as creepy laughing, heavy breathing, fast heartbeats, etc. and a low, ambient background song to really add to the tone of my animation."
Underground Escapades
Details: Christian writes, "Growing up, I had a huge fascination for sprite animations on YouTube and Newgrounds. One of the series that I was heavily interested in was Super Mario Bros. Z, a parody of the Mario Bros. game series with the Dragon Ball Z anime series. The main character in my animation, staying true to what I tended to watch as a kid, is Mario. Other characters that are involved are a few enemies found in his game series including goombas, koopa troopas, koopa paratroopas, and mechakoopas. All the animations included in the final product were symbols containing nested timelines unless there was a specific pose I wanted."
Spinning on Repeat
Details: The project is the story of a cherry blossom that morphs into multiple objects: an origami bird, a kite, and finally a book. While morphing, the object crosses the world, and finds itself traveling from the east to a more ‘western’ setting, a metropolis where the book is found by a girl who is just sitting in a square. The girl opens the book and finds a very familiar scene: a mountain with a cherry blossom, there’s a close up to the book and from there the animation starts again by repeating the first two scenes until the flower spins around. The circularity and how things cross cultures and the world, and in their essence are always the same although they differ slightly (e.g. the flower in the book is not colored) could be part of the animation’s meaning.
The Most Epic Race You'll Ever See
Details: Brett writes, "So many of my favorite animations, in both television and film, use humor, so my animation had to have comedic quality to it. I wanted the beginning of the race to come across as this epic event, only to reveal that the two contestants in the race are actually snails. The goal of any race is to cross the finish line as fast as you can, and obviously in a snail race that will take a long time."
Xibalba's Challenge
Details: According to Ben, this story"is loosely based on Maya mythology found in the Popol Vuh, which is essentially a long collection of stories that explain the world’s creation according to the Maya. Xibalba is the name of the Maya underworld, referring to the Death God challenging the twins to a match of the ballgame. I chose this relatively obscure setting because I am currently taking an anthropology course named “Pre-Columbian Art in Mesoamerica,” and I spent countless hours studying Maya mythology and the mesoamerican ballgame for a large presentation towards the end of September. Since I found the creation myths very entertaining, and I knew a lot about the art style, I figured it would be a topic that I could recreate somewhat accurately with my limited artistic abilities."
Blue
Details: Ashley explains that this animation was inspired by Thomas Johnson's "Heavy Metal Band" (see link elsewhere on this page.) She adds, " I immediately started thinking about songs that could easily be animated based off their lyrics and thought of 'Blue' by Eiffel 65... Throughout the entire animation, except for the orange guy, all the colors featured are different shades and hues of blue. This is because I really wanted to create a “blue” world that is featured in the song and bring the song lyrics to life.'
Omega
Details: Andrea explains, "I came up with this story one day while I was with some friends discussing immortality. I was curious about what would happen to someone at the end of the world if they were cursed with immortality and invincibility. It seemed bad enough to have to lose all of your loved ones and the idea of being exiled into space sounds terrifying. I want to take this story line and explore my character’s journey as the last human ever."
Cakewalk
Details: Hester writes, 'My animation title is called “Cakewalk”. I thought it was going to be clever and have some meaning like “oh this was easy-peasy”…but was I wrong. I guess that’s what I get for trying to be funny. But I’m not really sure how I got the idea of my animation. I think I was sitting in class, hungry, craving cake. Nothing super new…but I definitely was inspired by the idea of cake, and how much I would give to get a slice of something. In a way, I feel like we’ve all had that kind of experience where we see something and go “wow I gotta have that”, and just drop everything just to do it, or in this case, drop everything for a slice of cake.'
The Bad Idea
Details: Madison notes, "Once upon a time in a GroupMe chat frequently plagued by random chatter, a conceptual conversation arose on the topic of human burial. A friend stated he would prefer his body be ejected into the endless vacuum of space which sparked a tangent which I could not refuse to entertain…"
Tale of the Lonefish
Details: Al explains, "Originally the idea snowballed from the notion of having an ending scene with the word “Fin” written on an extreme close up of a fish fin. From its storyboard stages, extreme close ups were an important style choice for the overall tone of my story. Overly detailed shots that invade the character’s space offers the viewer a perspective of what it feels like to be the lone fish in a bowl. Early on I decided I would draw everything in my animation. In preparation for this assignment I drew various versions of fish on my own time, both in my sketchbook and while practicing with my drawing pad at home."
Friendless
Details: Blake writes, 'I titled my animation Friendless, I chose to tell this story, because I wanted the viewer to feel sad for the main character. The character’s aren’t named in the animation, the character who doesn’t have a friend is named Brannen and the character who doesn’t want to be Brannen’s friend is named Holden, then of course there is the teddy bear. It’s expected that the plot would be eventually Brannen finding a friend in the teddy bear, but I wanted to go against the typical happy ending for comedic purposes.'
Jabberwocky
Details: My animation is named after the poem used in it, Lewis Carroll's "The Jabberwocky." It is meant to highlight the 148-year-old poem and to make people look past the words, in hopes of seeing the picture that those words make. Special thanks to the graphic designer Grace Carter for creating the dragon eye used as part of the blinking effect.