Started my Animation since grade 4 (followed a tutorial about Flash animation on a magazine talking about how to make a pendulum swing)in China, and fell in love with it since then. For at least 2 years of not touching animation, till I Came to Canada, little did I know that a small event was going to change my life.
It was a school project, the teacher assigned it because he thought it was going to be fun. My teacher assigned us into groups, and we had to make a stop motion animation.
My group decided to make a claymation, but failed miserably. The arms of the characters would deform after a few poses, the character won't stand up half of the time, the lighting was messed up, everything went wrong. It was a disaster.
After my two group members gave up and left my house, I was going to dump all the play-doh away, and call it a day, but just couldn't do it. In my subconsciousness, the thought of getting it right and finish the project on my own could not escape from me.
Sitting on the couch doing nothing, drifting my eyes around hopelessly, I stopped on the DVD of the film "Chicken Run", deciding to pop the disc in and watch the extras and behind the scene materials. I was delighted to find out that their method of animation is completely different! They didn't move the limbs around to make a specific pose, instead, they made 50 limbs in different positions, and used each one specifically on individual shots!
Inspired by that, I decided to go back to the work station, and made a lot of legs/torsos all in different positions.
It took me another week to finish this:
I was proud.
After this little project, the long exhilarating feel of making an animation came back to me, and that time, I didn't let go.
Another animation I made, but this time was hand-drawn:
This is basically what I did:
After a while, I came back to Flash animation because drawing was not my thing (yet), which gained me a lot of respect and popularity inside my elementary school when I published my works.
Here's an example:
(based on The Incredibles)
People loved my work, they thoroughly enjoyed it, which further motivated me.
Wanting to make more than just Flash animations, wanting to expand further, I decided to make 3D animations.
I started off from a very easy-to-learn animation program, called anim8or, and picked up the basics in 2 months, grabbed my friends, and started on my new project.
As all of you know, kids could be easily influenced by other people or things. At that time. I was heavily under the influence of Pixar and the movie "The Incredibles". I made a movie about superheroes dressed in red... Just like The Incredibles.
(Watching this again 4 years later just makes me laugh. The bad rigging, the weird movement of the characters, my own adolescent voice, the general lame and cheesy-ness from a child's work is just funny xD)
I spent a LOT of time working on the project, and eventually finished it before graduating Elementary school (Being so committed to that project, missing a lot of homework was inevitable, and C's appeared on my report card), which again, caught a lot of attention, even the principal. He asked me to go show this to the whole school, and got me 15 minutes on the assembly to talk about it.
The amount of support I got when in grade 7 (my first year in Canada) was a huge boost to my confidence. I feel really lucky to have had this support.
When in high school, I picked up drawing, which really improved my animations, and made me notice little things such as the movement of the eyelids can express huge emotional change in a character.
I also "ditched" anim8or and picked up Blender 3D, which is another free 3D animation software that requires way more fiddling around than anim8or, and it is also more developed
After grade 9, my stage expanded onto the internet. People requested work from me, I was getting a lot of practice. Here's an example:
It was made as an introduction video for some drama class project a guy was working on.
A lot of my work were made for requests from a StarCraft gaming website, which I volunteered to help them out with for trailers of their events and other stuff.
My video for the event "Commentator Idol":
was noticed by another StarCraft website, and the main owner contacted me and offered me a reward if I make a opening video for them.
I obviously took the offer and made this:
And for my reward, I got THIS.
Not the best reward ever, but it is still pretty sweet (considering that it's my first gig ever).
Besides having people to use me as a tool to make animations, making short films in my spare time is also a hobby of mine.
My work:
This is a trailer for a movie that I was going to make, but my computer caught a spyware and the files for "the bird" was gone.
My work, "Addicted", was pretty popular amongst my grade, and it was even used as a presentation material for Richmond Addiction Services:
Some background story for this movie:
I heard the news about the boy that got mad because he got his Xbox taken away. My friends and I thought it was pretty funny (although it's not... pardon our teenage mentality), and so my friends urged me to make it into a satirical animation.
After writing the script, I went out to look for voice actors and a voice actress.
Since we don't have any female friends that sounds like a mother, other alternatives had to be resorted. I went online and searched for this voice of the mother. It wasn't a hard process looking for a voice, all that had to be done was me requesting voice samples from a girl that I know in that StarCraft website. She had a decent mother's voice, and she deserved the role. I let her record all the lines from the script that the mother says and let me do the compiling. For the father's voice, a friend of mine volunteered to record. For the kid's voice, my friend and I used Audacity to raise the voice actor's pitch so it would actually sound like a 10-year-old.
From this grabbing-the-voice-actor experience, I realized that a decent sized social network is needed for me to make higher quality animation.
and oh yes, this animation was done before I knew much about animation and how to properly make it.
That is all for my little "presentation" on my animation, I really look forward to getting in Vancouver Film School and get some professional training so it would enable me to express my creativity without my lack of skill dragging me down.
Check out my YOUTUBE CHANNELS for more of my work!!
UPDATE:
So I was accepted to the VFS Stand Out program and had a really awesome experience there! Here's the work that I've done:
The youtube video of this (bad render for the second part) was posted up by the VFS blog post over HERE
For the first piece, which was done on the afternoon of the first day, was my first ever paper animation that I made since the ninja man back in grade 7, and I had a blast working on it.
For the second piece, the 3D animation done on the morning of the second day, turned out really well, given that I did it completely out of my intuition, which means that there was no structure both in terms of the workflow and the actual result that never came up in my head.
