Bursting Bubbles
December,12th, 2023
For this assignment the two ideas I came up with were a bird and a girl popping bubbles or a recreation of a badminton match. I went with the bird and girl prompt because I felt it was more of an original idea. The final decision of the two characters being a bird and a girl was not an easy one. At the beginning of the assignment my animation was going to be 3D. Since I cannot make a 3D rig yet I was giving all of the creativity of character development to Blender. For my pitch of the assignment I was stuck between two girls or the forest animal pack.
After some thinking I thought having the bird pop the bubbles would be interesting since their beaks are already pointed and have the snail character wanting to preserve the bubbles instead of popping them like his counterpart. The idea was approved and I went into storyboard mode with the two characters. I also watched tutorials on how to make the bubbles.[2.93] Blender Tutorial: Quick Soap Bubble Animation
What made me make the switch to 2D was the complicity of the Blender rigs up until this point the only rig I had worked with was provided by the pervious lecturer and these rigs had so many controls it was overwhelming. At that moment I remembered that I originally wanted to explore 2D but the pervious lecturer doesn’t specialize in 2D so I took the 3D path in the beginning of the class. But now that the current instructor was taking over the class this was my opportunity to get a taste of both in the first semester. I got the go ahead to change the medium and I began drawing up design ideas in Adobe Illustrator.
The next step was leaving me a little stumped since I had not created a storyboard in years. But the 2D lecturer gave me paper and told me to draw what I was thinking which helped get my ideas out of my head and onto something physical. That later was transferred onto the computer to make the final storyboard.
Showing the lecturer the finished storyboard she was able to give back feedback about how the bird should not be front facing but at an angle to make it more interesting. Also the girl on the third storyboard should be on the left side of the screen. After that talk I realized my two years in news had got me used to that boring and plain camera angle and now I had to think in more cinematic ways.
So the animating began, I wanted to animate in Adobe After Effects but the vector graphics came out grainy in the program so I switched to Adobe Animate. This led to a rabbit hole of videos learning this program.
Intro to Adobe Animate 2021: THE FULL COURSE | Beginners Complete Tutorial
Animating Vector Scene in Adobe Animate CC
Adobe Animate Tutorial - Animate Bursting Bubbles
Master the Adobe Animate Camera Tool in 10 Minutes | Adobe CC Tutorial
The Adobe Animate CC Crash Course (Beginner Friendly!) Adobe Animate | How to use classic tween in Adobe Animate
The bubbles proved hard to animate realistically but with classic tweening and going at a slow pace the outcome improved greatly. By the time I had finished the first three scenes and saw that the time was already at a total of 6 seconds and the rubric said it should be approximately 10-15 seconds. I knew I had to cut down the story because quality over quantity. The girl being at the left side of the screen left me feeling uneasy with how much negative space there now was even with all of the bubbles. So now the bird would fly in from the right and pop all the rest of bubbles in spit of the girl. When doing the key framing for the bird it looked more like a roomba than a bird flying around. Again I had to draw the bird from a new perspective. The lecturer showed me different keyframes of an eagle flying from a book and that is greatly reflected in the final design of the bird.
How to do key frame animation_Bird fly Key frames loop animation Animate CC
I am satisfied with the outcome of the animation. I feel that all of the different elements from the sound effect to the quickness of the bird,and the camera angles show a short story of a bird being a total jerk and popping all the little girls bubbles just because he can.
