Professional Capstone Review Reflection
Exciting news!!
I have recently had the opportunity to have my work reviewed by a professional within the Saint Louis design community. I got the chance to set up a Zoom meeting with Scott Mathews, co-founder and creative leader of the design organization Tremendousness. Their company focuses on creating compelling visuals that outline their clients abstract concepts. Tremendousness is all about telling stories which makes it the perfect company to get advice from for my capstone.
The main purpose of this meeting was to get acquainted with our professionals and to give them an idea of what our projects are all about. I was a little nervous at first. It is intimidating to show your work to someone who does this stuff for a living, especially when the your designs are still in progress. In the end, I came out of that meeting with strong advice and a clearer idea of where I am heading with this project.
I walked Scott through my concept, character designs, and storyboards. Scott would ask questions about where I came up with my ideas and what aspects of my project I enjoyed most. He was very interested in the storyboards and gave me a lot of ideas of how I could make the stories stronger and communicate more strategically. Here are my main takeaways from my meeting:
- Scott explained how I could use the environment around my characters to exaggerate the emotions happening. The fun thing about animation is that the artists can control everything happening within the composition. This means that if I want my background to change colors because something dramatic happened in the scene, I can go ahead and do it! It is all about finding effective ways to communicate with your audience. This is a technique that a lot of cartoonists use when telling a story and I think it will prove to be a great addition to my animations.
- Scott commented on how he really likes the way I draw out facial expressions. There are very little restrictings which gives me the freedom to make the characters’ mouths huge, change the eye size, or have the eyebrows leave the forehead. He suggested I look at cartoons like Spongebob Squarepants or Adventure Time to study how they exaggerate facial expressions.
- In my stories, the characters do not speak. I wanted them to communicate only with nonverbals. I personally believe some of the best animations out there are the ones that speak no words. My plan was to incorporate sound effects into the short like footsteps, wind, or gasps from characters. Sounds that help illustrate the story and add more entertainment. As I imported my storyboard panels into AfterEffects to create an animatic, I started thinking about music and whether or not I wanted to incorporate it into my stories. Scott advised me that music is tricky because unless you are composing it yourself, you will never find something that fits the mood of your animation just right. However, he suggested that if I did pursue the music idea, I needed to find something subtle that didn’t upstage the story. He also suggested I merge different songs to match the tone shifts that happen within my stories. I will make sure to keep both in mind.
- One of my stories is about how one of my characters is painting something and accidentally sneezes which makes ruins the painting. In this story, the character learns that it is okay to make mistakes and sometimes accidents can turn into masterpieces. Scott really enjoyed this story. He said that he related to it a lot because as an artist, he worries about making mistakes himself. He thougtht a way to provide more entertainment to the story or to over exaggerate the problem is for the character to accidentally do more things that ruin the painting. Maybe she accidentally steps on it. Maybe a bird tries to fly away with it. This would add more comedic affect to the story which would potentially be more entertaining to the kids watching it. I really like this idea and I plan to revise my storyboard to include something like that.
- My second story is about a character who goes on a big montage of activities in an attempt to earn money to buy a toy. When he finally achieves his goal, he notices a kid in the distance who looks upset. As he walks closer he can see that the kid is holding a broken toy. The character shows empathy by giving his toy to the kid. The moral is that working hard pays off but nothing is greater than a kind heart. Scott also enjoyed this story but agreed with me when I said it needed a tune up. Scott claimed that the connection between the main character’s goal and what the kid was sad over needed to be stronger. He stated that the goal didn’t have to be a toy; it could be an icecream cone and maybe the kid accidentally dropped theirs. By making the items the same for the main character and kid, I am building a stronger connection. I orginally had both characters with different toys but know they are the same and decided to show the kid in the background of one of the beginning shots so that the story feels more full circle.
Scott’s ideas really helped me get a better understanding of what my stories were lacking and how I could fix it. I am grateful for the time I spent with him and look forward to our next meeting!
