Have Faith

Have faith. Those two words have lingered with me ever since they were uttered to me.

Faith has been lost upon me for some time now. At an early point in this project I realized I was going to need a little.

I was studiously putting most of my time into my animation and not liking the results I was getting. I have put in sooooo many hours of reading, researching, tinkering, creating, and recreating animations.

I started with my basic idea of creating a character running from point A to point B. I figured this was an ideal first ever animation project. I used an image I found on Google as the background. I did not want to create my own background because that itself is a huge animation, and I would need to put in a lot of time and watch more tutorials to get it right. The result is this:

and then this:

 Once I executed this, I immediately knew I was not happy with this, so I began thinking of another element to incorporate into this scene to spice things up and I knew I needed my own background.  I came up with a running horse:

I put the 2 characters together into a freshly made black and white background ( b & w is easy to speed paint with and I knew I could knock it out in no time).

( Thankfully this is not my final. I did see that some frames appeared 'stuck' at the beginning)

Can you guess what happened? This result still did not please me. I knew I was getting somewhere, but still was not there. In my photography, I love to make my image b&w and have a special item/area left in color. This creates a powerful, meaningful, and focused image. I thought this idea could work with my animation. Nope. Epic failure.  

I am feeling unsuccessful because I seem to have abandoned myself as an artist and forgot to make something with a meaning and something that has a little of me in it. I had to take a few days off and clear my head on how to make something I will be proud of, even if I don’t have a part of me in it.

After a few days away from my animation, I began to work on a new background and ways to make my characters appear in an interesting way in the setting. 

And no- I don't have all the time in the world. I have sacrificed a lot, but do it because I need to be proud of what I create.  

I have watched a lot of tutorials that taught me some fun effects. For one of my procrastination and ADD moments, I created this for my 3 year old niece who is obsessed with Frozen. I thought I would share. 

A moment, more like 100, of weakness

I am told venting is a good stress reliever. Personally, I prefer to workout more than once a day, but this option is not fixing my need for great results. 

I haaaaaaaaaaate being out of my comfort zone, as most individuals do. In regards to my animation, I feel like I am not obtaining top notch results. I also know that top notch is not going to come from my first ever animation.

 I have laid out all of the pieces I need to accomplish my final animation. I have rendered multiple animations of my character running to ensure the run appears smooth. I placed the character against a background I found and was not pleased with this simplicity, so I worked on a background of my own in b&w. I believe this consisted of 50ish frames or so. I did not want my animation to just consist of this character running from right to left,so I added that horse I created for SL into the mix as if she were being chased. I found an armored character and placed him on the horse to act as a villain. As I was putting this together, I ran into a few issues that prevented me from altering/adjusting/painting/etc. I also began hating my b&w background and scraped that and created a colored background. At this point I have my new background set in frames, 48 frames, and am starting to place my character, keeping in mind not to do what I have previously done. 

As I work on these trials, I read and watch tutorials and stray off of my project to create animations using techniques that I wish I could have done with my proposed project. I have failed at trying to incorporate these techniques due to my restricted drawings of my character. I have made a pretty cool animation that does not pertain to my proposed project- that made me happy and feel somewhat confident that I have a bleak chance at surviving in the digital world. 

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