My Reflection of Senior Year

          Out of all the four years that I have been in eCommunications, I have come to love animation more than the other three strands in our program. Animation has become the one class that I look forward to everyday that I come to school. The perks of being in animation the last two years of your high school years is that you get to have animation five days a week for nine months of the year. Animation has been the one class that has never let me down and has always been my favorite class that I have ever taken in all of my high school career.

         For my final year of high school, I have worked incredibly hard to create the perfect animations that I created merely from an image in my mind. This year, I felt as if I needed to create more than one project so I would have more for my portfolio for senior show. However, I knew that by creating two big projects, I would be struggling with time because I love to pay attention to detail.

          At the beginning of the year, I had so many ideas for projects to create this year. There was a variety of ideas like a native american campground, a kitchen, a cabin, a Mario Kart racetrack, a cemetery, a mansion, the entire inside of my house and an enchanted forest, but I ended up creating a mushroom village instead of all of those ideas. I knew from the beginning that all of these projects would have to be made in a squished time of three quarters of the school year. I decided to start the year off with a cuter project and work on my Mushroom Village. This ended up being a mistake to start with this as my first project.

          My first project ended up turning out great, but the one thing I would have changed about it would be when I started working on it. This was a horrible idea because I spent my entire first semester working on a project that could have been done in a couple of months if I really pushed myself instead of just working on it during class time. I had a lot of opportunities to stay after school to work on it and get it done super fast, but I didn't and ended up wasting so much time to work on my other upcoming project. I realized that at the very end that I should have started with the other project first, which is the Carnival.

          The Carnival. My goodness, this project was a tough one. I tried to start working on this project during holiday break on my Windows computer, but I ended up not knowing how to use any of the keys on the Windows keyboard. The main thing that made me upset with the Windows keyboard was not knowing how to pan. I looked it up and found how to do it but it never worked on my keyboard at home. I decided to wait until I came back to school after break to work on my project at school. I started to work on my project and about a week into it I realized that I wouldn't finish by just working on it at school. I had about two months to work on and finish another really big project by only working on it at school. I decided to do some shopping and started looking at iMacs. I knew that I would be using an iMac in the future so I might as well get one then. During the time that I was waiting for my computer to come in, I worked on my project during and after school. When my computer finally came in, I got started on everything immediately. I stayed up till three or four in the morning every other day just working on the project trying to squeeze in everything I wanted to do. This went on for another two months or so. I finally finished it about a week before it was due, cameras were ready to render, lighting was perfect, it was good to go. I hit the render button and it crashed, so I tried again and it crashed over and over. I got help from my instructor and he gave me options, tried them, it didn't even come close to working. I have decided to give up on it until I go to JCCC next year and get help from my professor then. Until then, it remains a mystery as to why it will refuse to render.

          After I finished up with my animations, I decided to start working on necessary things for senior show at the end of the year in April. I decided to work on a business card designs (mostly because they were due a week after I finished my animations.) They took a long time to design because I could not find a color scheme or I always had a hard time figuring out what my logo was going to be. I knew I wanted to connect my first and last initials but it was super confusing as to how to connect them. I finally figured it out and made the color scheme electric blue and carbon grey and I managed to figure out how to connect my initials.

          After my business card, I decided to work on my website and or animation portfolio. I only had a few animations done so to me it seemed a little pointless to make a portfolio for me but I did it anyways because it was required for the senior show. I had only put the White House, Gummy Bear, Mushroom Village, and some photoshop projects on my portfolio because I decided from junior year that it is better to have quality animations than a quantity of animations. I tried to put on a couple small animations but those were only small things like a 1950's TV and an animation of the emotion "Nervous". I tried to design my website professionally with a color scheme of creams and blues.

          Shortly after finishing my website/portfolio, I decided to work on the most exciting part of the senior show, the demo reel. This was the most exciting part to work on for the senior show because it has to do with the animations that I have worked on over the past couple of years; it's a two year scrapbook in a way. The one thing I hated about starting it the most was the fact that I had to work with Adobe After Effects. I do not work well with After Effects unless it is something simple like making words move or rendering videos. The thing was, I forgot that all I had to do was pretty much drag and drop videos of my animations into the program and make them fade in and out and then also making words move, which I already knew how to do. The one thing I would change about my demo reel would be the length. The length was standard for how many animations I had made over the two years (which was four animations) and it ended up being being around one minute and 45 seconds long including credits and an intro. I wish I had more animations to add into the demo reel, but quality is better than quantity.

          Senior show finally came at the end of April. I was super nervous because I knew that eComm invites people from businesses from Kansas City and I knew I would be talking to them during the three hours that we were showing off our work. I believe that I talked to about three people from high end businesses in Kansas City because they were asking questions like "What can you do with this?" or "How do you plan to advance your abilities with this?" Those questions were easy to answer because I had prepared myself to answer questions like those. The one thing I would change about senior show was the fact that it was too long. Most of the students were standing around for the first hour doing nothing and just kind of talking to the people beside them. The second hour, people were starting to pile in and then the students got busy talking to the families and business people. Then the last hour, the students were standing around once again and doing nothing but talking to their peers around them. If it were me planning this, I would have shortened the time of the senior show to two hours instead of three hours. Other than the time, everything was great.

          After senior show the school year slowly started to slow down and animation started to become less busy. I started to realize that I will be graduating high school soon and I began to think to myself that I have grown as a person and as an artist in eComm. Senior year in eComm has been absolutely phenomenal. This year, I have worked super hard for everything I have accomplished. Animation has been a great part of my life and has helped me figure out what I want to do with my life. Back in eighth grade, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew older. I just knew I did not want to do or work as an employee that had to deal with computers; now look where I am today. I have grown to love animation and the people that I have worked with for the past three to four years. I truly am going to miss this class.

The Mushroom Kingdom Has Risen

Finish Finale

          The end has come to my project at last. I am excited to see the final project after an entire semester! There was only one real purpose for this project and that was to practice my texturing even though my textures on the mushrooms are just solid colors. However, the textures on the ground, the rocks, the doors and windows, and the grass look really good in my opinion. But alas, let's just put that aside for a second and move on to other thoughts.

The Creation

          All right, so in the beginning of the year, I had no idea what to create for my semester project. It needed to be simple enough so I wouldn't stress and cram it all into three quarters of the year (like last year...) and it needed to be complex enough to possibly place in the top five for eMagine in April. I thought of all of these cool projects I could do like a Native American campground, a campsite, an enchanted forest, a carnival (which I plan to start on next!) or even a kitchen. The thing with most of these ideas was the fact that they were all too simple or too complex to finish within a semester. Then the next thing I thought of was Mario Kart on the Wii and the one race track map called "Mushroom Gorge", I thought I could do mushroom houses! It was simple enough to complete within a semester and nice enough to enter into eMagine. It was a perfect idea. So I got started right away and made nine mushroom houses that were each a different color and each had their own uniqueness. Building the Mushrooms was the easy part and more of the fun side of the project, and then came the downside of the project. I had to create the ground, grass, big rocks, flowers, and all that jazz to add some shine to the project. Texturing and creating that is easy but when you get to the texturing part, it gets a little dull and boring and it almost wants you to not finish it. However, I am a committed person and I wanted to just get it over with. Next was lighting (my second favorite part of all of this) and it was quick and easy yet exciting to work on all at the same time! Lighting just brings all of project together and really makes the project look nice. It's amazing what good lighting can do to a project. Lastly I had to set up cameras and render out all two thousand frames. The rendering is the worst part of it all because I have to stay after school really late and do nothing. The good thing is though, it all comes to an end and you have a good project!

The Learning Part

          A few things I learned on the way were mainly technical related. I learned the most important thing on this project and that was texturing. Texturing is just as important as modeling because it adds so much to the project; there really wouldn't be a project without texturing. Not only did I learn about texturing, I learned the more in depth stuff in texturing like the alpha gain and the coloring portion of it. I also learned a little more about lighting since I had to really focus on lighting unlike the last project I worked on. I learned that with some lights you have to have more than one light or else the shadows will just be completely black and you wouldn't see any texturing in that shadow. Other than those two things, I didn't really learn much from this project since I learned a lot last year both technically and professionally.

Repeating and Changing

          There are a few things that I would change about this project but I sadly do not have the time to change these few things for now. The main thing I would change would be the option to put trees around the grass that's around the village to make it seem like the village is not out in the open or in the middle of nowhere. Usually mini villages are more discreet and are hidden amongst plant life. Another thing I would like to change would be a different design to the mushroom houses to give them more of a variety because a lot of them are alike. There are also a few things that I missed when creating smaller things like the kitchen sink in the blue mushroom house. The sink in there has a sharp edge to it and I just forgot to use the bevel tool to make it smoother along the edge so it doesn't look so sharp. Other than those three things, everything else is really good in my opinion.

          The main thing I loved about this project and would definitely keep the same would be the texturing and the coloring. I absolutely love the colorfulness in my little village, it has a lot of character to it and really brings it to life. Color can do a lot for a design and when I see lots of different colors, it gives it uniqueness and makes it seem different than others (to an extent.) I also really love the types of textures and the things I textured in my project. I textured the grass, ground, pavement, fences, doors and windows to give it a realistic look, but then I colored the actual mushrooms just a plain Lambert color that didn't have any texture to it. I chose to give it this because I wanted to make it realistic but also cartoon-y at the same time.

For the Future

          This project was meant to focus on texturing as I said in a previous paragraph so I would mainly draw experiences from texturing to apply to my next project. I learned how to control the textures more and give them a specific look that I like, so I was able to make the textures (especially the pavement) look more realistic looking and that gave the environment a more believable feel to it. I also learned that I might take the Lambert textures and put them with realistic textures to give it that realistic, yet cartoon-y look or feel to them. Those are the two main things that I will definitely take with me so I can apply them to my projects in the near future.

In the End

          Overall, I believe that my project turned out great. It didn't turn out how I expected it to be, but it definitely was worth my time and was one of my best and most colorful creations. I did come across some problems along the way such as texturing and figuring out how I could make each mushroom house different, but I figured it out in the end. This may seem like a simple project, and it was, but this project is simple enough that it is a great creation. My favorite thing about this project is the idea simplicity but yet there is great detail in the texturing that make it more realistic. In the end though, I had a great time creating this project and will use my experiences and new abilities that I learned from my instructor in the future for other great projects to come.

Note to Reader: This project did not take and entire year to create, it only took me the first semester of senior year but I got busy again with another project (which I will fix and post about soon) and didn't finish and post this project until the end of second semester of senior year.