Jelly Bean Bros.

Finally, the time has come and I have made an entire animated story. When I first had to start thinking about this video I wanted to do something fun and just a little bit childish; so then the idea for jellybeans with faces came to me. For starters a story board was made where I made the basis for the story. After consulting with an expert, some things unfortunatley needed to be cut out of the story due to time issues. Basically, the story is about two jelly beans who get lost from their box away from all of their friends and family and they are trying to get back. The easiest part was making all of the components in photoshop where the sets and characters were made. As you see in one point of the story, the beans are on top of a magazine picture of Tanks Monthly, I had an entire other side to it that would have made that scene make more sense but it somehow got deleted and I unfortunately did not have time to remake it.

Next came the actual animating process that took a really long time. I had imported all of the things that were made in photoshop and finally brought them to life. I thought it was fun actually giving the characters emotions and I actually learned to do it on my own. It was hard trying to keep track of several mouths and getting the eyes and eyebrows to move exactly when they needed to. I also learned after the project was finished that if you keep a character set to certain settings it will completely disappear. Thankfully I had some help to correct that. I now have a little more respect for the people who do this for a living, because it is very hard to meet deadlines, especially when you have so many things to do within the animation.

If I did something like this again I think that I might do some things differently. I might make less scene changes because that was one of the most difficult things trying to switch between scene after scene. I wouldn't completely change the way I did things though because some of the stuff worked out great. For instance, even though my characters didn't really talk I would keep the way the emotions were made because it seemed really easy once I figured out what I was doing. I am glad to have done this project and now I can take some of the techniques I learned and hopefully apply them to later projects.

Until next time readers,

Jake Smith

Halloween

In web design we have been making a halloween themed web page. Not only that but we also added in some animations that made the page look even cooler. Here are the animations we used.

Using photoshop we simply made two different versions of the words "It's Halloween!" then put them both into an animation with frames in the middle to make them blend. Then for the pumpkin we used different shades of a light colored gradient and made it look kind of jerky to look like a flickering candle.