Artist Statement
From the beginning I had a difficult time coming up with what I wanted to focus my video animation on. But as I got had a couple ideas circulating in my head, I knew what I wanted to focus on. My idea stayed the same throughout the process of making the project. I knew I wanted to do an animation of a story or something with characters that would be easy to bring to life. I began by finding the Lorax book online and took screenshots from the book and photoshopped each scene so I could animate all of the elements. I did not have an experience doing this before other than doing what we did for the pop quiz, so I really had to play with the software figure out how to make each scene efficiently. In the beginning it took me so long to do any type of movement in After Effects. But as the scenes went by, I got the hang of it. Some of the most difficult aspects of this project was to make the movements of the characters or elements to look natural. The walk cycle took me about six tries to get the puppet pin tool in the correct location and to make the movement of the legs look like he was walking somewhat naturally. I knew I wanted to make the Lorax Greta Thunburg and the Once-ler Trump because I thought it spoke to the current issues regarding climate change and environmental issues in an interesting new way. I think this was once of the most successful aspects of my project. I also am pretty proud of my animations even though some of them are a little rough I learned a lot and you can see the improvement over the course of my video. There are some small details that could have been fixed and finessed a little more carefully if I had a long time to polish it and made it clean. I also could have fixed my audio and some of the transitions were a little wonky. I also agree that I could have utilized layers more to create more depth in my video. But overall, I am pretty happy with how it turned out.