Madison Vale

Reading and Writing

In “Animated Storytelling” by Liz Blazer, the chapters on Storytelling, Unlocking Your Story, and Storyboarding provide a guide to creating compelling animated narratives.

Chapter Two: Storytelling

This chapter dives into the basics of visual storytelling, covering essential elements such as shot composition, continuity, and story structure. Blazer emphasizes the importance of creating clear and engaging stories for animation and motion graphics, simplifying the process so creators can get started easily.

Chapter Three: Unlocking Your Story

This section offers some practical advice on how to develop and refine a story idea. Discusses techniques for writing a creative brief, finding and communicating a big idea, and creating tight stories with linear and/or nonlinear structures.

Chapter Four: Storyboarding

This chapter covers the basics of storyboarding, explaining its role in the animation process and how it is a blueprint for the final piece. Discussing important concepts needed to make a storyboard complete and ready for animatics and highlighting the importance of creating style frames to communicate the mood, color palette, and texture.

Research to Inform

This was a super fun animation for the breakup calculator. I especially loved the scenes where the tears floor the room to make the character look like she was underwater. Something so simple, yet super effective.

Something so simple looking, is actually super intricate! Not only did we get an introduction to each little character, we got the stats behind what went into creating them which helps people appreciate the work that goes into animation and motion graphics – it’s not easy!

This video is quite different from the other two. I absolutely love the ripped paper/collage effect that is used throughout the video. It creates texture and visual appeal to accompany the important topic.

Create

This personal introduction was definitely a refresher on the in’s and out’s of After Effects. I was able to play around with different keyframes and effects to make my elements differ from one another.