The Outsider

Overview

I called my animation The Outsider, and I decided to tell this story primarily because I picked the song first. I had no ideas for a project and knew I needed to come up with something before our first class period after being assigned the project, so I went through some of my old favorite songs and picked one that had lyrics that told a story within 45 – 60 seconds. The key characters in my animation were the blue cat (later named “Nebula” by their owner) and the unnamed owner who only appeared for a short time.

Design Choices

I’m not sure how noticeable it is, but I tried to go for very subdued colors throughout the animation to convey a sort of listless, greyed out feeling to show why the cat wasn’t really enjoying their situation (of being lonely and uninterested in activities to being adopted but feeling uncomfortable and out of place). I used an opacity mask over most scenes to make them blue and lifeless, and put Nebula above that opacity mask to show how different they were (and gave Nebula mostly bright, highly saturated primary colors as their color scheme to further help them stand out). Looking back, I really think I should have used the websites to pick color palettes that were discussed in the Seitz reading on color to help me be more consistent with my color choices, but I’m still pleased with my work.

As far as audio goes, I picked the song “The Outsider” by Marina and The Diamonds before even coming up with a concept. Honestly, unlike everyone else in the class it seems, I had hardly any audio problems and was able to do all the audio work within Adobe Animate instead of cutting and editing it in Premiere. I suppose the only thing that somewhat annoys me is that after exporting the animation, the audio became noticeably lower quality and more muffled when it was crystal clear within the program. I honestly have no idea how to go about fixing this problem, especially considering I had to rip the audio from YouTube as it is not copyright-free, so I would have no idea how to get it in a higher quality.

I personally drew a large number of the assets for my animation, and I think the only things I did not draw were a few backgrounds (such as the forest background in the final scene and the backgrounds the cars drove on, as well as the car that was motion-tweened and a couple extra cats and cat toys). Cats have always been very easy for me to draw as they were my favorite animal as a kid, so I figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to create all the characters. I’m really glad that I did, honestly, because I felt like it gave me a lot more control over how I wanted my project to look, and I didn’t have to settle for any images or assets that didn’t perfectly fit my vision.

Workflow

The only main frustrations I had were trying to find the few assets that I did end up using. For example, I had spent a long time trying to find a pet shop background for the first scene to make it obvious that Nebula was an un-adopted kitten, but there were absolutely no resources that fit the bill at all. I knew that if I didn’t find anything, I would have to spend a lot of time on a simple background for no reason, so in the end I left the background looking pretty plain and later showed the car with the owner and Nebula leaving a pet shop (a vector image that I did not create) to show what I wanted to convey. Otherwise, I really didn’t have any problems with audio or any of my tweens and animations. I found everything to be pretty simple!

For once, I really stayed on top of this project and spent a lot of time on it, so I didn’t have to deal with a nightmarish time crunch on Sunday (although I still did spend 6 hours in the lab that day, at the very least it wasn’t 24). I kept all my layer names and file names easy to understand (for me, at least) so it led to a pretty easy, simple workflow when I really got in the groove.

Credits

I acquired the living room background, the forest background, the city background, the moving blue car, the girl playing with a kitten, a white cat, yarn balls and a toy mouse, a pet shop storefront, the background with a road and a forest from Vecteezy. The song used was The Outsider by Marina and The Diamonds that I pulled from YouTube.