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Making "Escapism"
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This journal details all my thought processes as I worked on this project throughout my senior year.
Character Designs
Tediously Spinning the Room
Redoing the Street Scene- one week to deadline
First Motion Test- Entering the Hands
Multiple Pans as I learn AfterEffects
Breaking Down Scenes
The intro sequence was my most ambitious scene. It took me about a month just to get through the linework without the character! Additionally, animating the spin in TVpaint and the notifications in AfterEffects added a particular challenge for the timing. With help from my friends, I was able to get it done with only a few stress dreams.
The "street scene" was the first thing I animated all the way in the beginning of the year. Similar to the room, it was created across multiple animation programs, and consequently, spacing and timing the notifications became a nightmare.
In the original version, the word bubbles had to overlap the notifications for the future chaotic segment— but Esmee walked in front of her neighbors. Another issue I found was balancing the busy visuals with the story. Initially, I animated Esmee to not react because I wanted to convey how commonplace the chaos around her was. Unfortunately, with nothing to draw the viewer's eyes, details (like the letter falling out of the protestor's argument) got lost.
The new version gave rules to the spacing and dramatized Esmee's reactions.
The "entrance" into the underwater world was my first motion test as I played around with animating patterns. I initially tried to do it all in TVpaint before realizing Aftereffects was better equipped for my psychedelic goals.
I had never used After Effects before approaching this scene and it definitely was a dive into the deep end. With such a long file, and many moving parts, it crashed my computer at least five times.
One early version included flashing visuals rather than morphing one— ultimately I found this too flashy and went back to redo it towards the end. Another version had the camera mapped to the swimmer and gave it a very artificial feel.
Spinning the Film
The film scene was created towards the end of the year— and at that point I felt comfortable bouncing from program to program. Using Procreate, FlipaClip, AfterEffects and TVpaint I animated the spinning film within basically a single day.
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