Reflect - End of year presentation

For reflect we were required to create a presentation to talk about our time at Leeds college of art and our year in animation. we were asked to create something new for the presentation and this didn't necessarily mean animation but i wanted to work on making short gifs for the presentation to show my thoughts and feelings on the year. These little characters that I'm using were something i had come up with the year before during foundation and back then i knew i wanted to animate them at some point, i just didn't know how or when.

The first gif was to show my confusion towards how I've ended up in animation when i applied for illustration. i wanted the character to look nervous and apprehensive so i had him have his hands together in a defensive pose and had him look around because thats what i was doing at the start of the year looking at all my new classmates with a lot of worries. the head scratch is for his confusion and befuddlement over the situation.

With this gif i wanted to show my intrigue and enjoyment with 2D animation which i would of liked to have done in traditional 2D but i didn't have a light box to hand, if i did i think it would of been slightly more complicated with the character maybe contemplating the ideas of squash and stretch and such. i added a glow effect to show how the light boxes can be really blinding and i think its a good fit for this wide eyed characrer.

This was the longest gif but also the most fun to do. I think because not was the longest gif it actually encompasses the life of an animation student; a lot of work that can swamp you. He gets overwhelmed but then quickly makes a recovery as the work is always fast paced.

Going right alongside work load is time management, because theres so much work over the year I've found I've struggled to keep up with work in the form of handing in unfinished work and having a extension which has frustrated me. With my character i made do simple head turns looking at sheets of paper while in the background a clock is whizzing by to show how he's losing track of time.

If this one had a sound effect it'd be 'AAAAAARRRGGGHHH!' the frustration and impatience with digital animating is painful. So i made the character look fairly calm and then insanely zip all around as he tries to calm down, while i don't fly round the room i do have to step away when animating in maya and photoshop because one can only look at a computer screen for so long.

Now when i came here i wanted to be a comic book illustrator so i decided that for next year I'm going to focus on development of story and narrative, quite possibly in the form of comic books. Im looking forward to the freedom i'll be getting in second year. 

This final gif was really just to bring to attention how i need to get into a habit of sleeping properly and not crashing out in college as after I've done my final hand in i will be catching up on sleep.