DETAILS ABOUT HANK GREEN’S BEES VS. ELEPHANTS:
Oh hi hi hi hiiii! Sarah here, this is normally where we give you all of the good resources and podcasts and links but this week, I wanted to mix it up a little bit!
For a while, I’ve been wanting to create an animation of one of Hank Green’s graphics- he’s smart, he’s quick, and sometimes when he talks you can just kind of see a pretty clear mental picture of what he’s breaking down. Right? Anybody? Just me?
So this week, my moment came! I found this clip of Hank breaking down elephants vs. bees and it just made a lot of sense.
On a separate note, I’ve been getting more curious about animation software/programs and just decided to go for it. I started out with Adobe Animate (though I’m eyeing getting into After Effects, seems like slightly more powerful/more options for motion graphics) and did all six of their little walk-through tutorials, along with approximately one trillion YouTube tutorials. I feel like I was drinking from the firehose this week in terms of how much there is to learn, but I swear it’s all a whole new super exciting world. If none of these words mean anything to you, nbd! Basically: i’ve been doing all of my videos for the last year in “traditional” or frame-by-frame animation. So, quite literally, for a standard 3ish minute video I usually draw somewhere in the ballpark of 1200-1500 frames. I’ve learned a ton, it’s a super satisfying process….but it’s also 1200ish frames per week, which I know is unsustainable for my body and for maintaining any kind of one-video-per-week pace.
So! Learning something new! So in that sense, this week is kind of like any other. Staying curious, lots of googling, coming in with little to no information and walking out of this week feeling….like I still have a ton to learn, but I’m making progress. The process of making this video was in some ways more frustrating than normal as I learned lots of nonsense words (tweening? what?) but in some ways, WAY easier as i could just manipulate say, a drawing of an elephant along a path instead of drawing or scooting an elephant 12 different times and saving each image. I didn’t fully take advantage in this video, but I think in the future this is going to let me get a little more into the weeds on the actual artwork/illustration side.
There were a few things I wished I could have done- would have been cool if the elephant actually moved its legs and walked across the screen, I wanted the green screen to be a smoother transition into the t shirt, and I would have loved time to do a creative transition from Hank’s talking face screen (PS i have watched Hank’s mouth talking so much this week to try and nail that lip sync that I feel very, very creepy) into the elephants. But! Alas! I’m really proud of this video, I think I’m figuring out how to insert my same timing and humor into this slightly-new-but-slightly-not-new format, and I’m really excited to see where it goes.
What should I sum up next?
SOURCES:
This week the video was based off of Hank Green’s video.
Here is the original in case you want to check it out!
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