Author: sedefi968

For my final day I prepared everything for tomorrow and I finished up anything else on the project as I could. As I mentioned from previous days I was unable to finish the project therefor I have no finished product but the whole process of meeting with many artists and working on this project has taught me a lot about the art world and what different jobs I may be able to work and go into in my future.

On Thursday I had a packed day. I had a series of meetings with the whole team that worked at Dash. I first met with Mack who was the cohost of Dash and gave me a general run down of what Dash is and what they do. I then got to meet Meryn who was the producer. She told me what her job as the producer was and how it plays a role into the production of their animations. Then I met Madison who handled the social media and marketing. It was interesting to learn about what she did even if it wasn’t directly related to what I wanted to do. I then met with the illustrators then 2d animators and the 3d animators. All of these meetings were all huge experiences i was able to have and I am very grateful to have met with these different members of Dash. I learned a lot about the flow and process of their work and it inspired me for the future!

Around this time I began realizing that it may not be possible to finish this project in the span of two weeks. It was an ambitious project to take on for having never worked on something like this and saw it through but additionally I only had two weeks to work on it. While talking to Damian Stamer he told me about some of his struggles with working on his pieces and some of the tactics he uses to get through his problems.

Today I started my day out calling a friend of Damian’s, a professional worker in a gallery up in New York. Her job focused on finding and connecting with artists to help them get their work into a gallery. She discussed her job and her experience as an artist in her field and we discussed how some things she learned could relate and help me with the general direction I planned on heading into as well. We discussed for about an hour together before I went back to working on my project. I finished up the base sketches and began working on the key frame sketches.
I talked with Damian about my current process for a bit and he let me go to continue working.

For today my game plan was to be finish the the base sketches of the major movements of the animation. The sketches took the majority of the day as I struggled with posing and sketching the ideas of the scenes. I also wanted to use perspective on the scenes where the character is in their bedroom which posed a further difficulty for me. I was unable to finish all of them and I talked with Mr. Stamer to figure out what I may be able to do to finish it up.

After I had solidified my idea I searched for music that could fit my project’s theme. I looked into a lot of Lofi songs as they provide the soft vibe I was looking for in my short animation. I ended up using a Lofi version of the song Avatar’s Love from Avatar the Last Airbender. I have a relatively strong attachment to this song and the show it’s from as I grew up watching it and avidly enjoyed it with my sister and dad.

For the purpose of my project I had to cut down the length of the song and edit it a bit to allow for better flow and cut down the time. This process was quite time consuming as I am quite amateur at sound editing and struggled to make it flow with the cuts in the song. I still don’t think it is perfect but for the most part I think it serves its purpose.

After finishing up the music I was then able to plan the animation sequencing and organize the action of the character according to the music. I also sampled some general color palettes I liked for future referencing. I planned all the general timing according to the beat and just how it would flow cinematically.

The I hopped on Zoom with Damian and we discussed a little bit about the planning process. He liked my planning a lot and thought it was pretty solid. We discussed a bit about how at times it can be challenging to start a project even after we’ve planned everything out and have all the details. I found that especially with art taking that step from planning to execution is often extremely difficult.

For the first day of my Work Experience I zoomed with professional artist Damian Stamer. He is a local painter who often displays and sells his art at formal galleries.

Prior to this meeting we had called discussing a little bit about each other and what I might want to get out of this experience.

We had agreed to try to come up with a project aligned with my interests and attempt to finish it within the span of this work experience. While his interest in the arts were much more fine arts oriented I quickly came to see that the process is quite similar in planning and execution.

I came into the meeting with some concepts and by the end of our meeting I had a general idea and topic for my project.

For the rest of the time I dove into designing and planning the project. I was planning on making a short animation of a character waiting for a text that never came until they fell asleep.