Madison Vale

Reading and Writing

Chapter One focuses on the pre-production process of creating animated stories, emphasizing the importance of planning. Highlighting how strong storytelling starts with a clear concept and a well-structured narrative, noting that it is important to capture your story’s core ideas and themes early on.

The chapter also emphasizes the significance of visual development, which includes storyboarding, character design, and setting the tone through aspects such as color, composition, and style. Research and inspiration is also a key player in the pre-production phase. Whether it’s drawing from real-life experiences or studying existing works, having references helps enrich the creative process.

Research to Inform

I love the speed of this gif, because of the rapid pace, I think it’s incredibly engaging.

The use of the static image of the street which the windows light up one by one is a creative yet simple way to indicate movement.

I always love a good hug! The way this gif loops by reversing is so smooth.

Another example of how even the simplest of gifs can represent bigger ideas. Again, i enjoy how it is simple and can be so easily understood.

This is a fun one. You get to see all angles of the fish as it swims around your screen over and over. I also like the hand colored texture of the fins which makes it feel more playful.

Create

Onion Skins

Based on a video of my best friend and I! Using onion skins on Photoshop has always been one of my favorite ways to create motion graphics. I decided to keep this one simple, because while I could draw over every detail of my reference video, I didn’t find it necessary for this particular piece. The hug is the central focus, not the little facial details. What I think is fun about this is the choice to keep defining characteristics like the glasses or earrings they’re wearing which still provides a glimpse of personality.

Cut Out

This was definitely a good refresher for how to create frames out of layers on Photoshop. Because of this, I kept it on the more simple side. I personally love a good black and white block letter. This took some playing around with order to come up with a gif that would flawlessly loop but we got there!

My Choice

If there’s one thing about me, I LOVE to animate handwriting. I think it always adds a personal touch to whatever I’m using it for. I have done it before on Photoshop but it is definitely not ideal when it comes to the time commitment. For this one I did venture over to After Effects where I used the pen tool to trace and key frames to animate it in.