Voices: My Creative Journey
Introduction
This assignment focuses on showing our own artistic growth from our early childhood, present time and creative hopes for the future through a story telling video. By using the program Adobe Spark Video, images and text are combined to effectively guide the viewer through my unique artistic journey.
Materials
Hardware: Intuos Creative Pen & Touch Tablet, Razer Kraken 7.1 Headphones
Software: Adobe Spark Video, Paint Tool Sai
Platforms: Behance, Creative Cloud
Creative Process
I wanted to my animation to appeal to everyone, no one in particular. By using a simple character design and minimal quirky drawings to help the user understand the flow of the story, I wanted the video/animation to be interesting to not just a few people, but everybody.
Music from the movie her was chosen for the background music in my animation because the story and the mood of the music blend together very nicely.
Also, even though most people will not notice, the character illustrated to symbolize me in the story actually changes color as the story progresses. He starts of as a light grey, and eventually becomes a solid black color. It is a little hint to the fact that I wear only one solid color now, so people who watch my video and know me in person will probably notice this little easter egg.
Starts of as a light grey
Concludes with a solid black tone.
Story Outline/Script
- hello, my name is Julian Gravesande (how to pronounce last name) and this is my Creative Journey
- I started drawing at a pretty young age, around 2
- I feel like a majority of other people. . .
- as a kid I love drawing video game characters
- even though at such a young age I didn't think my drawings were good
- keep in mind we are talking about kindergarten to grade 3
- but i know for myself. . .
- this is at a really young age so kids and teachers would be giving me praise
- time in grade 1 I had to draw my favorite animal
- I ended up crying
- I was and still am very hard on myself
- *FAST FORWARD* to around high school
- started to develop an interest in realism
- started to really get into it, practicing for hours on end
- so accustomed to drawing cartoon characters
- wanted to get good at realism
- was so into the idea of realism that I would practice for hours on end
- rip it up
- crying
- over time it did start to improve
- my moments in rage became obsolete
-towards the end of high school, I picked up an interest in life drawing and my interest has been here ever since
- since I already feel old, i still don't know where my careers lies, to be honest I don't want to be stuck working for someone else
- I just want to keep getting better at what I love to do
-lots of people are trying to find a job they want to pursue, but I just want to draw and hopefully paint
Production Methods and Workflow
Paint Tool Sai
For all of the frames a software known as Paint Tool Sai was used.
I would draw out all of the main events in my story first, then I would make additional slides of drawings if needed.
As mentioned before, I did not want to over complicate any design choices, so I stuck to a minimalist drawing of a stick figure that would represent me and my growth throughout the story.
Sorting all of the drawings used in my animation.
A total of 35 drawings were used in the making of my animation and all had to be organized cleanly in there own folder. I named each individual drawing based on what the illustration was about.
Adobe Spark Video was used to create my animation.
Audio was recorded within the Adobe Spark Video application and all of the images were sorted here too.
Conclusion
After completing my visual story I was rather pleased with the results. I showed the animation to a couple of close family members and they were immediately hooked by the quirky, cute drawings associated with each slide. I also found that the calming, uprising music helped in telling my story. If I could redo this assignment, I would have liked to change the transitions between each slide, because in my final video, all of them are the same. If the transitions were subtle in differences between I feel the visual story would feel a little bit refreshing. Recording using the application was okay, but I wish you were able to drag and drop recorded audio clips, similar to the way you are able to interchange slides so easily. In the end, I am rather pleased with my final result and I will most likely create another one for fun.
