Environmental Storytelling through 2D Animation

 So I went back to the drawing board literally based on advice I had gotten last week on creating several different assets for my project so I can have several different versions of my final project in the form of different seasons.  This week I was able to come up with the base assets I need to create my project and now all I need to do is plan out the rest of the things I need to create by plotting them out the same way you would if  you were planning a film shoot or writing a script and considering my background in film it should not be that hard a task.  I started out in Procreate and taking my initial sketch from last week and redoing the lines to make it look more streamlined and less hectic. Last week I was able to trace over the building and create kind of a preliminary sketch my original idea was to create the whole background and then add animated parts. After the feedback I got from class last week I took everyone's advice on creating different assets and then using them

 From last week I wanted to choose a waterfall style project because I like the effects I found a simple animation of an island with a flowing waterfall and my aim is to add other animated effects. I found several refences that I want to use to create my final project. I found this useful breakdown of this specific animation by Yog Joshi on art station. I plan on using his tutorial as a breakdown to animate flowing water and use it with my initial idea to use Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling water. I just need to find the best way to break down the motion of flowing water for my purposes. This first example shows a breakdown of the initial motion and which direction the water is flowing down the cliffs. Going from the first position to the fifth position we can see the different changes in elevation affecting the flow of the water.  The next set of examples breaks down the individual pieces it takes to create the visual effect of flowing water. Using these separate pieces you can creat

 Using references from pictures of Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water I am working on creating a background for my project and then the next step would have to be creating assets for the waterfall and buffing out the background so it looks nicer. Using Procreate on my iPad I am working on creating a background using a main refence photo and then using others to add details to get a more complete picture.    Using this main reference and tracing over the specific details of the building I was able to create a basic sketch which I am going to flesh out and add basic color to flesh out the picture.  I was able to create a basic sketch overlaying the building. I think the biggest trouble I am going to have is creating the foliage, but it is definitely going to be good for practice. Here is an image of it without the tracing reference.  This is only the beginning I need to put a lot of work into the background a lot more work than I thought I would need. But I was able to get pretty far

 I am trying to come up with a complete timeline for this class to get a better feel of what I need to work on more in the upcoming weeks. My overall plan was to try and work more into an animated background or landscape to test the overall scope of my learning with this new program. Creating an animated environment instead of working on direct character animation because my skills are not completely there yet but I want to try and see how many moving pieces I can put together to have an attempt at environmental storytelling. Environmental storytelling is mostly used in games to evoke the feelings of a player to take note of how things work and what is going on without needing to use exposition. This style of storytelling is not just linked to playing video games but is used in animation as well to create compelling stories and to provoke the thoughts of the viewers in order to become more invested in the story and the world that they live in.  I still need to figure out what I want to

 I wasn't able to accomplish much at the beginning of this week. I did a little more research into Digital animation programs. Looking back at both Toon Boom Harmony and Adobe Animate I was able to find a simple list of pros and cons for each program and found out while Adobe Animate is a good program it doesn't really have all the built in settings and background that Toon boom has and requires additional help from some of the other Adobe software such as using After Effects for lighting and technical effects. Toon Boom seems to be more of an industry standard for the most part but to get the highest use out of it you need to pay more for a better version of the program that adds a ton of new features, and unfortunately it has a steeper learning curve. While toon boom is a less cost effective program I definitely want to stick with is because I would rather try and get over its learning curve so that I am able to work better within the industry standard of digital animation.

 I have spent the last week practicing with Toon Boom Harmony to get more practice in using the program as well as working with my drawing skills. Using the second part of the tutorial I was able to create a simpler animation but this one tries to tell a simple story from a background I created in Procreate on my iPad. I initially created this image in Procreate with the idea that I wanted to create a simple animation added to it in an attempt to give the image a simple story. Using this as a background I was able to add a few elements to make the image come to life a little more I had to keep things a little simpler this week because I forgot to set the auto save on toon boom and lost a large chunk of the project. I wanted to take this image and add reason o why someone would be camping out in the middle of the woods at night so I added a meteor shower going on in the background and animated the campfire a little bit to bring the scene to life. The biggest part of animation itself is