Adobe Animate Project 

(Formerly Adobe Flash)

Our Adobe Animate project has been completed and presented to the class.  Unfortunately, the file is too large to post in its entirety - I hope to eventually find a way to do so though.

Here I will post and discuss the sections of the project I completed.  A link to my partner's blog can be found under links on the left of the screen.

The Sea Sheep Scene

In this scene sea sheep enter the mermaid's garden.  They are a threat to the seed the mermaid planted as they trample the ground.  The mermaid notices the threat and swims off to collect a large stick to shoo them away.

Miranda was the illustrator of both the mermaid and sea sheep.  She drew them both in Photoshop with pieces of their body in separate layers.  I imported all the bits into Adobe Animate and animated the front view of the sheep layer by layer.  Miranda had already done a bit of work on the mermaid - the bone tool was already set up in her arms and fin. The side view of the sheep (also illustrated by Miranda) is one piece (no individual layers to animate).  To make the sheep seem more alive from the side view, I gave the sheep a bit of a back-and-forth wabble when they walk.   

In the sheep's initial approach, I wanted to show them coming up over the horizon.  One of the difficulties was to continue the approach after they had come up.  I needed to find a way to swap the sheep from behind the ocean floor to in front of it.  I couldn't find a way to this in Animate, so I created two separate ocean floors.  The first would be in a layer in front of them, and the second would be in a layer behind them.  As they move forward, the ocean floor in front of them disappeared, and the ocean floor behind them appeared.

The Storm Scene

In this scene there is a strong current sweeping through the mermaid's garden.  It threatens to sweep away the soil on the mound where the seed is buried.  To save the seed, the mermaid fetches a large stone to create a barrier between the strong current and the seed mound.

In this scene I animated the mermaid "puppet" that was illustrated by Miranda, and the sea slug bunny that was also illustrated by Miranda.  (Miranda is a fantastic illustrator folks!)  

One of the difficulties I encountered were how to get the audience to understand the concept of a strong wind (or current I guess) under the water?  The answer was to use another perspective of the mermaid.  Thankfully, when Miranda created the mermaid, she created the body parts in pieces.  Miranda created the mermaid's hair in several layers (later on, I combined the head and hair layers as a single animated symbol we could play on a loop - and save us a good deal of animating time!).  I went back to Miranda's original head with all the hair layers and used them for the close up clip.  Bits of the mermaid's hair were moved, enlarged, moved more, and shrunk to give the audience a concept of wind.  Leaves (seaweed) and debris were added to the background and the foreground kelp plants were animated to show violent winds.

Another difficulty of this scene was timing.  When swimming with the current, the mermaid and bunny should look like they are being carried away, but they also need to appear to struggle when trying to swim against the current.  The solution was timing.  I needed to time things right to get the appearance of the mermaid swimming against the current.  To get the timing right was really just a matter of trial and error.  In one part of this scene I made the little bunny appear to be swimming backwards, giving the illusion it was not keeping up with the strength of the current.

The final difficulty was side effect of using the mermaid as a puppet.  Since the arms and tail of the mermaid had been outfitted with the bone tool, Adobe Animate would not let me use any transform tools (enlarge, rotate, flip, etc.).  When the mermaid comes back from offscreen to the right (and swims to the left), her tail is upside-down, and her arms are on backwards because I could not flip them to be shown from her other side.  Angling the tail believably and hiding the hands under the stone were the solutions to this issue. 

In both of the previous scenes, the different animated objects were repeatedly inspected to make sure the different pieces of a character fit together correctly.  Sometimes the upper portion of the tail was not connected to the torso.  It was a bit time consuming, but we strived for perfection.

Transitions and Credits

The above is one of the three transition scenes that I created for our video.  Since they are all similar, I'm not posting the other two.  The only difference between them is that the first one says, "Time Passes..", the second says, "More Time Passes..." and the last says, "A Month Passes."  I'm sure you get the idea.

I created the watery background in photoshop.  I tried to get a watercolor appearance and even watched a few tutorials on YouTube on how to do so.  I think the water background could have been better.  This background appears throughout the film with the exception of Miranda's opening tree sequences.  The watercolor background use in those cases was borrowed from a third party.

I also illustrated and animated the bubbles.

I was also in charge of creating the final credits.  I used the water background and the ocean floor I had already created.  The animated plant I illustrated and created as an animated symbol shortly after I created my previous plant animated with the bone tool.  Since this plant hadn't made it into previous scenes, I felt it should be incorporated somewhere.

The difficulties here were the timing or pacing of the words as they scroll by.  I had reduced the speed (really it was a decrease in movement per frame - motion tween was used) a few times.  I do feel that the words still scroll by too fast for the average person to read.

I had wanted to add the mermaid and bunny swimming back and forth and even have animated figures of Miranda and myself in snorkeling gear meeting up with the mermaid or have us waving to the viewer.  Because of its low priority and the approaching deadline, it was never created.

Odds and Ends

I created the ocean floor, water background, and kelp that are seen throughout the film. 

While I did not illustrate the sea slug bunny, I did add little "feet" and convert him to an animated symbol to give the illusion of him constantly swimming through the water.  

I did not illustrate the mermaid, but I converted the illustration of her hair to an animated symbol to show it moving in the water.

I illustrated a tree to use in the opening sequences, but overall I was unhappy with its appearance.  Miranda created a second one we both liked better which was used.

Final Thoughts

Miranda and I had some lofty goals for our story.  We had a shared vision of what we wanted.  We had our struggles with the software to accomplish what we wanted and some sacrifices were made.  At one point I had spent 15 hours in one day working on this project (it was a long day) and Miranda worked one night until 4am!

When we presented to the class, we were asked if we were happy with the final product.  I stated that had we had the rest of the semester to continue to work on this project, I probably wouldn't be happy with it, but I am satisfied with what we had created despite our limited knowledge and experience with the software.  Our professor commented on the perfectionist nature of Miranda and myself.

Given another opportunity, I would enjoy working with the Adobe Animate software again.