FMX 210 Digital Media

      For my final animation I decided to get started with compiling my many years of random worldbuilding and story writing for my big personal project, and to make a teaser for the start of the first series in the story "Another Infinity." The story follows the character Ciel Thekivan (pronounced Teh-kee-van), as she becomes a multiverse adventurer following the end of her home universe. The voice which can be heard in the video is actually not Cici, though. The voice is the guardian goddess of Cici's homeworld, Yelva, who works alongside Cici through the story as they both try to solve the mystery of what happened to their universe. Another thing to note is that the ending scene is meant to be taken literally, since during the adventure Cici discovers that she has a power known in the lore as "the Art of Motion," which includes the ability to fly, as well as telekinetic abilities. 

      Since the animation project was supposed to be like a teaser trailer for my personal project I've been making, I needed the audio to sound very epic and cinematic. That was actually surprisingly difficult to do with GarageBand, since most of the loops which were installed on the computer I was using were like "door opening" or "car driving" or "baby crying," or just a number of other random sound effects which were completely useless for my idea. Also, even the musical tracks which GarageBand has, are all mostly very upbeat pop or disco types of tracks which were not at all fitting with the dark, dramatic, "existential crisis" energy which I wanted the soundtrack to have. However, I did eventually find a few synths, piano tracks and string tracks which I could work with, and overall I'm quite happy with the end result. 

For this project we were supposed to use a self-portrait to make a statement about who we are and how we see ourselves. As an artist and a writer, a large part of myself comes from my imagination and my fictional worlds, which means I may sometimes seem like I "have my head in the clouds." So, I painted some clouds around myself, (painted instead of using a photo because the idea is about my art and my fictional worlds rather than anything coming from reality) and using color correction tools I aimed for the appearance that I was merging with the sky and becoming a part of my surroundings. 

      For this project we had to create a scene in which multiple versions of ourselves were in one space creating a story. I decided to have my little clone army having a game day party, which ended up going better for some than for others (XD). Also, since the TV is my roommate's and not mine, I couldn't turn it on for the picture, but I also knew that it would probably be a bad idea to just leave it there and do nothing with it, so I decided to just pretend like it was broken and one of me was trying to fix it. 

      For this project the idea was to put ourselves somewhere in a fictional world or a scene from a movie. Naturally, being the huge Star Trek nerd that I am, what better place would there be to put myself than on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, alongside Captain Picard and Commander Riker? Now, I did hear the suggestion that I should have made myself facing in the same direction as them, however when I think about it I feel like looking a different way actually adds a bit of a story to the scene. They are focusing on one thing, but maybe I saw something going on in the background that they hadn't noticed yet? Maybe it would become important later on in this hypothetical episode? With all the wild things that happen on that show, who knows?

  For this project the goal was to take an image which was previously in black and white and colorize it, in a similar way to how historians estimate the colors in historic photographs, but with more of a creative twist. Since this was around halloween time, I wore my halloween costume in the photo. And, since that costume was from Star Trek, I decided to try and go for a very "otherworldly" or "alien" theme when picking the color palettes, especially on the eyes, hair, and skin.