I'm Finally About to Journey On!

My four years in e-communication.

       
          It's finally over. For four years now, I've experienced the high school life. Just like any normal person, I took the required core classes such as english, math, history and science. What separates me from other kids is the fact that I was fortunate enough to get to participate in e-communication. Everyday I looked forward to that class. At the beginning of the year, I never would of guessed that I would be so close to some of the people I am close to now. That's the beauty of e-communication, forming friendships that could last a lifetime. E-comm has taught me so many things. Technologically, it has expanded my knowledge with programs such as Maya, After Effects, Photoshop, I Movie, Dream Weaver and etc...I've learned to use some of them really well while others were just temporary. Collaboratively, e-comm has taught me to be more outgoing and share my ideas. I've learned how to work with others and be a team. I've learned that communication is a very important thing. Everyone needs good communication skills later in life. People need communication skills to live a life. Socializing is a big thing in today's world, without it, you wouldn't be able to network, function or accomplish much of anything. Another thing I've learned is project management. It's so easy to lose track of time when your doing something you enjoy doing. Constantly, I found my perfectionist side coming out. I wanted everything to look absolutely perfect and once I thought something looked perfect I would move on...only to change that perfect thing later on or add to it. Time management is huge, sometimes you just have to turn in what you have and move on. It's better to have something then nothing. Finally, I've developed leadership skills. Being a leader is a difficult thing. People rely on you, look up to you and expect good things from you. It's easy to lose insight and become stressed when you are a leader. Some people just don't understand how it feels to have that much weight on your shoulders. Leadership is healthy for the mind, it develops you further and puts you above normal. All of these lessons and skills didn't always come easy. They were all challenging in their own way. Those challenges are what make me the person I am today and without them I would never be able to take my next step in life. Sometimes we need to take risks to learn something about ourselves.

Strengths & Weaknesses

          My strengths and weaknesses are different each day. I have days where I feel like I can accomplish anything and then I have those days where I feel weak and unable. To start, I know for sure I am weak in the time management area. Time management isn't necessarily a weakness for me in everything I do but for modeling it sure was. Like I said up above, I am a perfectionist. I used to sit and trace cursive words when I was younger. I would practice for hours. After I finished tracing, I would transition to a blank piece of paper and try to write the words I traced. I would re-write them until they came out perfectly. If the words didn't come out perfectly, I would cry and erase it. I know it sounds like an issue but it actually comes in handy. We see ourselves as having issues but we don't focus on them as being beneficial. Today I know how to write in cursive...but that's not all my "issue" does for me. It helps me to make my ideas and imagination come to life and appear visually attractive. However, it does hold me back when it comes to time. I found myself staying late after school to work on my 3D city of the future. My internship made it more exhausting due to me having to leave school, go to my internship and drive back up to school to work. I did finish my 3D model though, right at the last second, literally. Sure, I wasn't completely finished and yes I saw some things that needed improvement but I learned that you just have to turn in what you can. You never know what the outcome will be. 

         I am also somewhat weak when it comes to sharing my ideas and criticism. When it came to group projects, I was kind of hesitant to share my thoughts. Like when I had to get together with some peers and do a stop motion, we were all struggling with ideas to do. I had a few but I didn't want to share because I was afraid of criticism or being judged. E-comm has helped me to feel more confident and view criticism as a path towards improvement. It's still hard to accept it, but who doesn't think its hard to take a punch? I actually kind of find joy in taking criticism and accepting it as a challenge though. 

          One of my most valued strengths is my creativity. I have been able to exercise my brain in so many different ways during these past 4 years. I have expanded my brain and explored parts of my brain that I didn't realize I had. I feel I have many creative ideas...it's the making it come to life part that is the tricky part. 

          I also value my ability to learn. I keep my eyes and ears open each and everyday so I can learn something new. I was able to further my abilities by focusing and listening to my teacher and the peers around me. Whenever I would go for help on a project, I always learned a shortcut or something new that I didn't know before. I am always open to expand my knowledge in everything and anything I do. As humans we crave knowledge, we want to know more. That's what makes it so hard to die, unsatisfied curiosity. 

What now?          

           I feel I am going to do so many great things with what I have learned in e-communication. All of the skills I have developed and put into action are all needed to be successful in life. Some students don't realize how important these skills are until the time has come when they actually need to use them. I will go out into the world and network, create contacts, manage my time and use it wisely, use my knowledge, use my creativity, be leader and do so many great things. I will definitely need the leadership skills for when I possibly create a business one day. I hope to climb the ladder to be a CEO. It will take work, no one said it would be easy but they did say that it would be rewarding. Sometimes you don't have to be doing something great for these skills to come into play. It's in everyday life that we need these skills. Around family, friends and strangers. 

          To be honest, there is nothing I would change about my experience in e-communication. Everything I learned and improved, all of the friends I have made and all of the challenges I have faced and failures I have experienced have happened for a reason. I wouldn't change one thing about my four years in high school. They have made me who I am today and who I will be later on.

          Overall, this journey is both rewarding and memorable. I will look back years from now and remember the big impact that e-comm made on my life. I will miss the atmosphere of the Animation room, the multiple personalities, the projects, the people and Mr. Netterville. Sure, I may have been quiet, a little less crazy than most of the people and I may have seemed like I didn't have fun in Animation but truly on the inside, it is one of my best and favorite high school memories that I will carry along with me for a lifetime.

YACHTS!

New Start...

      It's the start of a new year at Olathe Northwest high school. With a new year beginning, which will also be my last, it also mean that this is one of my last in school projects. With this new project, I wanted to start a project that doesn't leave my boundaries of what i'm capable of. I thought about doing a 2D drawn animation or something involving After Affects or Photoshop but I decided that I wanted to model in Maya but models something a little different, and also model something that would still challenge me. So with those boundaries, I chose to model yachts, not just the exterior but the interior of the yachts as well. All of the yachts would be different because not every yacht will be the same. I also planned on adding a moving water affect near the end of my project to give it a little more of a real look. With this idea, I knew it would take some planning and a lot of browsing through videos to figure out new tools and shortcuts to use that would better my experience. 

First Yacht...    

   
     I started by pulling out different polygons and morphing them to fit my expectations. For example,  I would simply place a square block, which comes pre-made, then if I needed a triangle (not a pyramid) I would add subdivisions, put the object in vertex mode, then adjust the various points to form those triangle like edges. After finding the achieved fit, I would then put the object in face mode and delete the extra faces that still made the object appear square like. After deleting, this would leave an awkward hole in the object which I could fix by going to edit mesh and selecting the fill hole option. So basically the example above represents most of what I did to create my yachts. Obviously it took more than just moving vertexes and deleting faces but go through step by step would be exhausting. After finishing the difficult task of finding the right yacht shape, I then combined all of my polygons and came out with my first partially finished yacht.

     

Second Yacht...     

   
     With my first yacht finished, I then began my second yacht. I mean, an ocean is not just going to have one yacht floating on it. Like the first yacht, I began bending, stretching, and minipulating polygons to fit my style of yacht. The only thing different about this yacht compared to the first yacht is it's style, or in other words body shape and exterior, and this yacht required more extruding and subdivision work. I was more free to sort of play around with the style of this yacht and kind of do random things till it feel right. 

Conclusion...

   
     After having created my first two yachts, there was still more work to do, the interior. I knew doing the interior would be the hardest part or one of the hardest parts of the project. Thinking of where to start became difficult and had me sitting in my chair staring for quite some time. Due to the staring and my brains creativity flowing in all different directions, I decided to keep my yachts but instead of modeling the interior, make a cities for my yachts to chill at...I had wanted to do a city for sometime now and this was an opportunity I didn't want to waste. This city wasn't just going to be some normal city you see today but a futuristic city. So I continued on with my last thought...and my city has yet to come to life...

Reflection (Animation)

The Year is Coming to a End!

   
     As the end of the year approaches, and by approaches I mean...2 half days are left. So with the Junior year ending and Senior year approaching, I would like to take time to reflect on my fantastic school year in animation. In a short summary, I could say that I learned a set of several new skills, those being in Maya, Photoshop, After Effects and etc...Not only animation skills but skills needed to survive adult hood as I go on my own and search for my first job. For example, communication and collaboration skills, interview skills, time management, how to fill out a resume, the appropriate way to dress at events and lastly, I learned networking skills. Even though I learned a handful of skills that do require hard work and each individual to be hyper focused...I also learned what it means to make friendships and have fun while doing what you love the most. With this summary, you can really see what a year spent using every minute of time will do to help develop a person. Now I will go more in depth and explain the little things to connected to these skills and how they benefitted me this year.

Beginning the Year w/ less experience: 

   
     I've already basically summed up the things I've learned, now I would like to explain how I learned those skills. It can be seen as obvious by many that the animation skills were developed through the practice of modeling objects and using the application Maya to make my creations come to life. 

The Fishy:     

Scanned drawing

Own fish texture design

     
I remember at the beginning of the year, I was assigned with our first real project, the fish. Now, coming from past years like my Freshman and Sophomore year, I already had some experience using the applications Maya, Photoshop and After Effects but this project was way more on the upper level. So in my mind, I'm thinking "okay...I like a little challenge entering in to the beginning of the school year." I had decided to go all out with this fish and became competitive with the people around me. I wanted to make the best looking fish in the class...but as days went by, I became weary and grew tired. I sort of lost my motivation but don't mistake my tiredness for giving up. I did finish the project and realized that I would need to manage my time better. Through that project, I didn't just learn about time management and how to stay motivated but I also made some friends along the way. With the friends made, I knew I could then compare, ask questions and get help from them. The fish model gave me a lot of freedom with design (how I wanted my fish to look) both body wise and color wise. I learned the wedge tool which was used to make the fish fins. The wedge tool basically allowed you to wedge the fin after extruding it, kind of like a wedge of cheese. I also learned a new technique that I had never thought of before which involved scanning in the drawing of the fish, importing it into maya, creating a cube  polygon and adding subdivisions, then switching to vertex mode and selecting each individual vertex on both side and stretching the polygon to match the shape of the fish.

Middle of Year:

     
     After the beginning of the year slowly fading and the start of quarter 2 coming by, each individual was given a little freedom to kind of explore their strong suits and figure out their weaknesses. We were each to create a project, any project, whatever floated our boat. So of course everyone was stoked and happy to truly figure out what they were good at doing. So with a little thought, I decided to work on some modeling, mainly because I enjoyed modeling in Maya the most and thought of it as my strong suit. 

The Castle:

     

Untextured castle

I decided to model a castle in Maya. During the long modeling process, I ran into the struggles of the usual Maya crashing which caused me to restart but at the end, I was truly glad it happened because it taught me that problems WILL happen and sometimes, you just have to figure out a solution or find your way around the problem. But most importantly, you CAN'T GIVE UP! During the modeling of the castle, I learned not use the boolean differencing and union every time I wanted to form a new polygonal shape otherwise, it will cause major lag and create even more polygons that aren't suppose to be there. I got to explore the different tools in Maya while figuring out how to spice my castle up (add detail to make more appealing). With the helpful tips and ideas from the people around me, I was able to finish a model of the castle without a texture. Then, I put in those little objects to give the castle that blah bling. The finished castle looked great and was a good challenge for me. At the end, I definitely figured out that my strengths involved modeling and having a good mind for working around problems but I struggle with time management. I see a great idea in my mind but I also need to keep in mind of how much time will be absorbed during the creation of the project. 

Gummy Bear Stop Motion:

     

Toothpicks used as weapons...pretty creative right?

My last project that occurred during 3rd quarter was a stop motion project. This project was by far my favorite experience and i'm excited for the upcoming Juniors to get to have the same experience I did. So enough talking about how much I enjoyed it and i'll get down to the details. So during the quarter, me and 4 other people in my class were grouped together. We were assigned to for the next few weeks, work together and create an amazing stop motion. So...we got together and blurted out ideas on what the story needs to be about. After a lot of discussion (not really) we finally came up with a permanent plan..that plan being to do a stop motion about a gummy bear village being attacked by a giant bionicle creature. We all brought in supplies like candy, frosting, lollipops, animal crackers, gummy bears, cardboard...I think you get the idea, and we used those items to create the set. Then we got a camera and one by one moved the gummy bears and the creature for each shot. the moving and shooting process took awhile. Then the images had to be connected together through editing. We managed to finish the project, leaving great impressions on our faces and the peoples faces around us. After that final 3rd quarter project...4th quarter then came around the corner.

End of Year:

   
     With the first semester and 3rd quarter pretty much done, I had the freedom to really start on anything else I wished or anything that didn't waste time. So with that, inspired by my car needing new rims, I decided to create some sweet rims that I wish I had. 

Nice Rims:

     

Rendered black and red car rims

I used the application Maya to start off with a simple open holed cylinder and used that as the tire that would later be the foundation for the rims. I began to just add on and form different shapes till I found one that looked like real rims. After I finished, I textured the rims. I made them match the color of my car which is the color red and black. 

The Planet:

     

Render of finished planet (Planet name: Platuni)

After the creation of rims, I then decided to randomly make a planet. I originally made it as a tutorial for my next blogpost but it also counts as a project. I took a torus shape in Maya, also known as the donut polygon, and I switched from object mode to multi vertex mode and began to stretch it outward. The stretched outward shape created a cool ring design that you usually see on the outside of planets. Then I created a sphere and applied a lava space rock sort of texture and double applied it to create bump mapping or in simpler words, give it that 3D bumpy texture. And as simple as that, I had a planet. 

Photoshop Designs:

     
My next project was to create something fun and different in photoshop. I wanted to explore the paint side or drawing side of animation...so I decided to recreate a dream I had in photoshop using paint and brushes. I also pulled objects from other sources and made them my own. To finish it off, I added a quote that linked in with the image I tried to portray. I enjoyed that project so much that I decided to create a puppet control scene with a quote embedded in the image. I also created many other things in photoshop that were mainly created just to experiment with the different tools and effects you can use in photoshop. I really like the way they all turned out and figured out that I have so many ideas in my mind that sometimes, I just need to start drawing to really get them all out. 

Other creation

Other creation

Overall Experience:

     All of the events lead up to now...me writing a blog. It can easily be said that I learned a lot of different things. But with the senior year coming, It was time to think about what I would do with the things I learned. And my plan for the summer is to work with real people in the entertainment industry to really get a feel for how real life jobs in this strand will be. I am also going to continue to learn more and strive to fill my brain with the most knowledge possible because in the end, you never get better without lots of practice. Overall, I wouldn't change a thing except for my time management because time  ticks by and people have places to be and things to do...so when I have clients, they won't have all the time in the world for me to finish a project for them. They instead will have a set date and I will need to learn how to meet their expectations. Other than that, I feel that all of those events and occurrences happened for a reason and those experiences are things that I will remember for years to come.

In-Class Stop Motion

A Beary Bad Day

Stop Motion Animation

Stop Motion Animation

What is a Stop Motion?

   
     A stop motion is an animation that involves the process of taking several pictures while at the same time moving the objects you are using in your scene. Once you have captured all of the pictures you will use in your scene, you can then combine the several photo's taken to form a video. Anyone with a camera and props can create a stop motion, but it will take time till you have your final product but in the end, your final creation will be worth it. While stop motion might be tricky and require lots of patience, it also requires a lot of thinking if you want to come up with something original and creative. You have to know your boundaries, what you can and cannot do. So I will share with you what process my group and I had to take in order to create our stop motion.

Coming up with an idea:

The three main gummy bear heroes.

   
     The first steps my group and I had to take when creating a stop motion is coming up with a plan. Everyone needs an outline or some sort of idea in order to successfully start and finish a project. So we each had one day to come up with a few ideas to share the next day. We met up and shared our lovely ideas while group members agreed and disagreed. We got stuck on two ideas and then broke down which idea was and wasn't possible in the time we had and the difficulty. After all of that hard decision making, we finally agreed on one. Our idea was to create a scene made out of candy, almost like a miniature set, and have our main characters be different colored gummy bears that had to fight off a giant creature that had invaded their homeland only to cause pure destruction. Obviously we knew that this task would not be simple but we were definitely going to put a challenge at our hands and fight through it, just like we planned our gummy bears to.

Beginning of process:

   

Creature coming to destroy gummy bear territory.

     The first step we took to begin the process was to assign each group member a role. In order to make this happen, we needed lots of candy, a camera and cardboard. All of these items played major parts in creating our scenery. After gathering all of the required item, we then began the set building process. We had to make three gingerbread houses, which brought back childhood memories, then we had to make a background behind the houses and grass. We decided that the best gingerbread house would be the main characters house and the rest would be the extra gummy bears houses. We used colored construction paper for the grass and the sky. Building the walls of the set were tricky because you had to angle the walls to where it would let light pass through so when the photo process began, you could see the set and what was going on on the set. We then finished up the set by applying dum dums (lollipops) in the ground to act as trees and taking gum drops and sticking them to the ground to act as bushes. We set up the gummy bears in their first position and gave them toothpicks to act as weapons. Now the photo process can begin.

Photo process:

   
     The photo process was by far the most nerve-racking part of the whole process. You couldn't make one mistake or you would have to restart whether that meant accidentally knocking the object over or forgetting to move another object or etc...but good thing luck was flowing around us because there was not one mess up that happened. But before taking photos, we had to plan out how many shots we needed in order to make the video look the least laggiest possible. So we sketched out storyboards which allowed us to see what actions where going to happen, when they were going to happen, where they were going to happen and what type of shot was needed in order to make the scene look decent. After capturing tons of photos of our gummy bears and giant bionicle creature, we went into photoshop to connect the photos together and edit any weird color contrast differences in each shot. We also had to create credits and of course add in music for suspense and emotion.

Conclusion:

     

Gummy bears fighting off the creature to save their land.

     Given a finished product, we then got to have enjoy eating the left over candy an fun destroying the set. We were proud of the individual work each group member contributed to help end the project with a great project. We got to share our final product with many others while they showed us their creations and gave us feedback, the majority being positive. For my first stop motion I can say that it was a very fun process and I hope to one day do it again but a little more advanced so I can have a new challenge for myself.

Final product:

     

Professional Project Review

Western Spaghetti

Stop Motion Animation

Stop Motion Film

Main Idea of Stop Motion:

     For a professional review, I wanted to review a project that I think is neat and different from normal computer animation. So I decided to pick a stop motion animated film. For those of you who are not familiar with stop motion, stop motion is a type of animation but instead of pure animation, it is a mix between film and animation. It sometimes uses real life objects with animated objects and combines the two. The thing about combining both real life objects and animated objects is the fact that you have to move objects around, frame by frame which takes FOREVER! The film I chose to write about is Western Spaghetti. Western Spaghetti is about taking real life things that you wouldn't normally use to cook and using them as food, and cooking utensils or whatever is needed to cook spaghetti. 

Elements from Stop Motion:

Before

After

     The stop motion uses elements that relate to the foods you would use to make spaghetti but it's not exactly those foods. Honestly at first, it was somewhat difficult to pull out what the idea was behind this film and whether it was make for fun or enjoyment or if it had a story behind it. I believe it was make more for viewing things differently, and seeing the creativity of using yarn type materials and sewing materials to create spaghetti. For example, you see the person boil long colored toothpicks which later come out of he boiling water as colored rubber bands. This refers to when you put in hard spaghetti noodles and when they boil for long enough, they come out soft and flexible like. This of course isn't the only neat aspect that catches my eye but there are many things that pop out as neat to me.

Design:

     The design of the stop motion film is very creative and I thought the idea of using cooking to show that is a good way to go. If I had to guess, i'd say the title of the stop motion film refers to the west as normally being a place where knitting is used a lot and when cooking spaghetti they incorporated the knitting and sewing in with it to form western spaghetti. Not only is the stop motion creative but it uses elements that would show comparison to the food you would put in spaghetti. For example, it uses yellow post it notes to be used as butter being easily sliced. They also use a rubber cube and chop it into smaller pieces which I thought was really neat since it showed the work and effort that had to go into making that rub cube split up into all of those pieces. The use of needle holders in tomato form to create the spaghetti sauce and the aluminum foil being squirted out of the water holder was neat. I wonder how much time went into this process because based on how the aluminum foil was used and was perfectly formed to look like real water took. Same with the tomatoes being smashed and turning into tomato sauce.

Conclusion:

     Overall, the creation of this project was worth while (obviously shown through views) and left a confused, shocked and curious face on the viewers of this video wondering how in the world this video was created. I hope to someday incorporate this style of animation into my work and really be shown the hassle it is to make one of these stop motions come to life.

Before

After

Stop Motion Short Link To Video: https://youtu.be/qBjLW5_dGAM

Castle Model (Part 1)

Castle Structure Model Stage

Coming up with idea:   

     
     For the first semester of Animation, my job was to come up with an idea for a project which I would be working on for all of semester 1 and probably part of semester 2. I had about a week to come up with my idea and finalize what I wanted to do with my idea. I wanted my idea to be challenging but not too challenging, I also wanted to model and rigg later on in the year. I came up with the idea to model a building of the Prague castle. I met up with groups to talk about my ideas and get input and give out input. Originally, I had planned to model off of the Prague castle, but unfortunately, throughout the modeling process and after finishing the base of the structure, my file corrupted due to too much boolean. Booleaning is essentially combining and differencing polygons (shapes) to form a new shape. So with a unfixable corrupted file, I had to restart which was pretty frustrating but after restarting I realized that I was glad to have restarted. My reason being that the first castle I was creating wasn't original and was based off of an existing structure. After restarting I decided to come up with my own castle and make it original instead of being based off of the Prague castle.

Beginning modeling process:

Front center piece of castle (starting point).

Front center piece of castle (wireframe view).

     
     With the idea of modeling an original castle which I do not yet know what I will call it, I could being remodeling. To start off, I created a simple rectangle polygon and continued to add castle features, such as arcs, fancy doors, windows and basically a lot of little details to make things pop when the castle model is finished, After finishing the simplistic front to my castle, I continued to add and build on that shape. When I say build on the shape, I mean keep adding larger polygons to that shape to make the castle much larger. Once the castle fit the size I wanted for the final front piece, I added balconies and railing to make the castle pop and appear taller (shown in the screenshot shown to the right). When satisfied with the front piece of the castle, I created more polygons, mainly simple shapes like rectangles and square shapes, to come off of the front piece. This would enlarge my castle and give me more room to add important components that you would see on any royal building like stain glass windows and roofing and pillars or columns.

Patterned borders.

     It took a lot of thought into the development of the castle, mainly because I haven't seen a castle in real life, but luckily I had a handy dandy computer and keyboard at my hands so I could easily go and search up images of a castle to pull out ideas. Many ideas pull out from other pictures include bordering around the castle and the patterned borders on top of the castle. The patterned borders gave my structure the classic castle look at least to me because one of the first things I recognize when I see a castle is the patterned borders running across the top of the castle.

Roofing 3D texture on roof of castle.

     After looking at my castle from that point, there was something that bothered me and that was the roofing of the castle, I HAD NO ROOFS! So I created roofs on the castle, having a really hard time trying o determine what I wanted my roofs to look like. I decided to combine the typical house roof style with a diagonal surface going down across the front and back of the roof and a flat surface for the top of the roof instead of a pointed roof. After adding the big roof, I added more roofs all around the castle in places I thought would make the castle appear to have more than one level and much larger interior wise. I created roofing to fit on the roofs and give the roofs a pattern and 3D like texture instead of just painting it on. 

     Finally, after finishing the body of the castle, I added flags and other fun details to my castle. I then started on creating the landscape for my castle. I wanted to create some sort of mote around the castle and show the castle surrounded by water. I am working on creating the the path coming off of the castle and a bridge to go over the water. I then plan to add more hill details to landscape. The second part of my castle which will be worked on during second semester will be the texturing of the castle. 

Reflection:

     
     To reflect on my creation, I would say that it is turning out to be pretty awesome. I do feel like this model is taking longer than expected since I still have yet to finish landscape and texturing, as well as lighting which will definitely bring out the details on my castle. But who said animation was easy? I would say i accomplished a lot in the time I was given, although not finished, this is an experience to learn from and it's better to learn now than later.

What I have of the castle so far.

Wireframe/selected view of castle (better look at detail).

     

Professional Project Review

Jinxy Jenkins, Lucky Lou

Animated Short

Animated Shortfilm

Main Idea of Animated Short:

    
     For a animated short, you want something with a story that pulls you in, with creativity that flows throughout the short and of course, appealing animation. An animated short I would suggest is Jinxy Jenkins & Lucky Lou. This short is about a man who is cursed but wishes for luck (Jinxy Jenkins) and a girl who is full of luck but doesn't appreciate it enough (Lucky Lou).  Soon they run into each other and get to experience the worst and best.

     The professional work shown in this was very well done to me. It was more of an animation you would see in a movie or cartoon obviously, in other words it wasn't stop motion or anything like that. I thought the emotion in the characters shown at the beginning of the story and throughout to the ending really helped you to connect with the characters and understand the story.

Elements from short:

    

Jinxy jenkins being pulled by umbrella as mirrors break.
The breaking of the mirrors is suppose to give you 7 years of bad luck.

     The creators of this short did a good job of adding elements that showed the luck and bad luck of both characters. For example, the girl was walking past a store and through the window you could see slot machines going off and all of them landing on jackpot. An example showing the guys bad luck was mirrors breaking as he was pulled past them.

   I think what the creators could improve on is possibly showing the cause of them getting bad or good luck. Like why did the guy start off with bad luck and the girl start off with good luck?
But I suppose when making a SHORT FILM,you want to get to the point.

Design:

    

Emotion shown through characters.

     The opening scene of the short was very creative, it introduced the characters one by one and had them walk off the screen. From what I know about animation, I know it is hard to make characters walk. They did a great job of adding different walking styles for each person, the guy being more slouched over and the girl being more upright. Just the walking styles itself showed which was more depressed with all the bad luck and which was ready for their day of good luck. I really liked when the guy was being pulled by his umbrella because of the strong wind. It made me think about all the worked that went into just creating that one scene. I think making the characters silent was a smart move, it saved work time and it also showed the story through emotion.

     An element that I'll be sure to focus on when making animations is the emotion of the characters on faces when we start to do faces cause that is a difficult task and an important one. I'll also be sure to focus on story, that is the main focus cause without a story, there isn't a use in having an animation.

Conclusions:

    
     Overall I think the short came out great! It contained all the elements that are needed to enjoy a good animated short. But most importantly, it showed that any one person can lighten up your day no matter how bad of a situation you think you are in. I hope you think the same after watching the video!

Both characters share a popsicle after experiencing friendship. 

Animated Short Link To Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1W-OC7MTCY