Lazarus Mid Term

This project was very, very entertaining. I had this picture in my head of a psychic trying to bend a spoon with his mind, and figured the animations on that would be appropriately easy for our current skill levels. So I ran with it… though originally, the project had a much broader scope than I ended up with. I was planning on having a lot of are damage occur—the desk break, the walls start to bend, the background get destroyed – what I ended up with fit the size (I recall her saying “do not overdo it”) of the project and do it well.

The hard part about these projects is getting all the stuff you need into what your imagination says… namely the pen tool, lol – I hate that tool!

But let’s break it down piece by piece.

Storyboarding: I did a pencil storyboard, which I did by pencil. I ended it early there knowing it could go on, and basically did “Half” a storyboard – intending to do more if I had the space. Little did I know how cluttered things could get quickly.

Multi Layered: Man. This thing has a TON of layers. It has to. I created 2 primary folders; Foreground and Background. Within Foreground, there was a folder for the Spoon, the Papers, the Dude, and then just a layer for the single Desk layer. Within the Background I had a folder for the Window (and it’s cracks).I needed the multiple layers because of how many motion tweens I used, and how various parts of the scene were changing constantly.

Drawing Objects: I mostly used the Paint Brush and the Line Tool - though I also used basic Rectangles... despite how much I dislike it, I used the pen tool to create the Spoon (though it ended up being useful because of how i needed to resize it before I made it a symbol.

Symbols: Man, I have a ton of symbols. The Papers were handy, because I had to troubleshoot so much to figure out layers, I ended up deleting several layers, and just dragging the paper sheets over. Very cool. Symbols were very cool to work with in this context.

Frame by Frame: the original first ten frames are frame by frame. That's basically him moving over to the spoon.. I wish I could've made it slower, but that's okay.

Tweening: Man, I used a ton of them. A LOT of motion tweens, and one classic tween. The motions were him moving, the spoon moving, the papers moving all over the place. his twitching in concentration was amusing to me. This is where I had to end it early, as I was feeling it was already getting very long for the project - there are no shortage of tweens and layers in this thing. I could've gone on for quite a while.