My movie, “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. I tried to give both characters a distinct color scheme, because there would be scenes that would show them from far away and I wanted them to look unique.
[Orc and Gnome from far away]
The orc I gave muted green and brown tones to highlight his simple and brutish nature. The Gnome I gave bright blue and red to make him pop, and give off the impression of a more dynamic character. I made both of their bodies as symbols and just added their faces as layers in a given scene so that I could move their mouths and eyes when needed.
I used the song “Fantasy Game Background” by Filu and Dina (a light mischievous-sounding string instrument fantasy song) (Link) from Jamendo in the background of the whole movie. I used this particular song because I felt that it fit well in the setting of the world I was trying to set up. The voice overs for the characters’ lines were done by friends of mine (Daniel Matthewson and Christian Martinez) and myself. I used them because I knew they could do voices that would match the characters. I wanted to also put auxiliary noise for certain scenes, like the hammers hitting the boulder, but I ran out of time and was not able to find sounds that would work for the particular scenes.
I made all of the artwork used in the film. I wanted all of the pieces to look cohesive, and I thought that finding separate assets would not work if they did not all look like they belonged together. I also was not sure that art assets online would have movable appendages, so I set out to make my own art for the characters that I could move and do whatever with for a given scene. This consisted of drawing them in a separate fla file, converting them to symbols there, and then copying the symbols over to my project to use. This was probably the most time-consuming part of the assignment, but I think that it went a long way to make the piece as a whole look unified.
The main problems that I encountered came when I was trying to draw the pieces for the scenes. Sometimes it would put a certain thing that I drew on an asset with the paintbrush tool behind the asset instead of in front where I drew it. I overcame this by adding a layer above the symbol’s layer inside the asset’s nested animation editor. This would just repeat the thing that I drew every frame. This is apparent in this scene where I introduce the dragon:
[Dragon that was overly complex to draw]
To make this symbol, I had to add layers in its nested animation. I started by putting the wings in the back, they layering the body and eyes on top of that respectively. I then just collapsed these layers into one to give me the image I wanted.
The other setback I ran into came with sound. I did not realize that animate could only handle certain types of sound files, so my audio files did not work on it. Instead of putting the sound in the animate project, I instead decided to to put the .mp4 of the project without sound into premiere pro, and then adding the sound when needed there. This did make lining up the voice overs with the characters’ mouths difficult because I could not edit them with the sound like I would be able to in animate. This also became a problem when I was trying to put in my own voice overs, as I was not aware that certain scenes went by as quickly as they did. This is really apparent in this sequence:
[Gnome and Dragon become friends]
That scene went by faster than I anticipated, mostly because I was not sure of the conversion from frames to seconds, which resulted in a quick sequence that I had to rush my lines through.
If I could go back and do this project again, I would certainly change a few things to make the process as a whole smoother. The main one was planning and executing my ideas in a more structured manner. I worked on and off on this project until the later half of the week before it was due. If I could go back, I would have devoted a set amount of time each day so that I would not have to spend hours certain days making scenes. This would have given me more time to do other things that I wanted to do, like line up the voice overs with the characters better, and insert other sounds into the finished product. Overall I enjoyed this project, it made me think in a different way than how I am used to, and was a really good way of learning how to properly use Adobe Animate.
Link to my movie:
https://trinitycommdepartment.com/~aramire4/Animation/AnthonyRamirez-animation-giveMeAQ
Credits:
The music in the background was “Fantasy Game Background” by Filu and Dina from jamendo.com
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