For simulated work experience I was assigned with 6 others to assist Ying Jian, Canaan Ji, and Yuchen Zhang with their animation, ‘Good Luck’.
I was nervous at first, being part of a large group of people can make communication harder. I also worried about looking stupid by asking too many questions, but what if I couldn’t do the tasks?
In the end, the worrying was for nothing. My group were really organised! From the beginning they were responsive, they shared a detailed description of the project, with a list of tasks to choose from.
I was also given Procreate as a choice of software which I have some experience in. I wanted to push my knowledge of it and see what the advantages/limitations will be.
The task I chose was animating incense smoke. They’d sent me reference videos so I could have an idea of how they wanted the movement. It was fun and relatively straightforward. I tried to make it look natural, mapping out the shapes that smoke can make, and sent them my first version after a day.
My feedback was that the movement was good, but needed more in-betweens. This was educational, and it became an intricate task, drawing further transition between shapes. I then traced over each frame further as I thought the natural boil would act as another slightly different variations of each “key frame”.
Looking back I could see what they had meant, it was a lot smoother for the extra work.
Week two I was directly assigned a task. This time there were two components to animate – a tree in the breeze and birds flying across the screen.
I tackled the movement of the tree first, they’d expressed that they wanted it to move like a skirt, so I anticipated needing more in-betweens, so I made a rough outline. I’d learnt how to animate bird flying in my pathway lessons, so I had a formula to follow.
My first draft feedback was that the tree was good, but the birds too close to the foreground. I studied the background image and re drew the birds to match the curve of the horizon line.
I also added a shadow line to the tree. When I checked with the team, it turns out they wanted that animated too if I had the time.
I offered to colour the tree, as I viewed that as part of the animation task. They clarified that colouring will be done later, my rough line was all the needed for now. I hadn’t separated the two in my head so it was interesting learning their process.
I found my work experience positive. We didn’t meet in person, but the communication was always clear, and the tasks were well organised. I think it’s already making me a better animator, and I’ve learnt more about Procreate, as well as judging my work. We’ve spoken and I’m going to continue helping them with more animation tasks for this project going forward.
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