Overview:
since the release of the “Transformers ‘Classics'” toy line and the 20th anniversary DVD release of The 1986 Transformers Movie in 2006, I have been fascinated by the converting robots. For my animation, I decided to recreate one of the scenes from this movie, which you can watch here. I titled the animation “TransBOREmers for two reasons. First, parody is funny. Secondly, I removed most of the other elements of the scene beside the main character and the background, leaving a result more boring than the source material.
Design Choices:
Everything that is seen in the animation besides the background in the title and end slide was hand-drawn using a drawing tablet. As much as I would’ve loved to re-create the cell-shading used in the movie, time restraints meant I had to make sacrifices, especially given the fact I was creating every element from scratch. I tried to make my animation for more cheesy than the movie, however, this proved difficult because the movie is actually quite cheesy. My favorite aspect of my design choice was during the last scene of my animation when Optimus Prime transforms back into a robot and flies through the air. To give the illusion of the truck moving while turning a robot, I drew the landscape as a large circle that spun while I had the stationary truck transform.
Work Flow:
I had limited problems when working on this assignment. Bootcamp helped to answer many of my problems. The biggest challenge I faced was figuring out how to use the camera tool, however, after a short amount of research I was able to coherently use the tool to enhance my animation. My first scene was far too detailed and took much longer than anticipated, therefore for the rest of the animation, the backgrounds were simplified. I decided not to use Adobe Animate for audio, as I have far more experience using Adobe Premiere for A/V editing. The process for finding all of my sound effects was not difficult, the search just took awhile. Finding sounds for diesel trucks and air brakes with no background or environmental noise was buried deep within YouTube’s search results.
Credits:
Audio:
Stan Bush – The Touch
Peter Cullen as “Optimus Prime”
YouTube’s sound library provided all sound effects, including the “eech-och-wheecho-oh” transformation noise.
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