Animation Artist's Statement

Artist’s Statement – Flash Animation

When I began my flash animation, I decided I wanted to tell a story that was suspenseful and engaging, so the idea for a ticking time-bomb seemed to follow naturally. I was unsure whether I wanted to have the bomb detonate at the end, or have the main character diffuse it successfully. In either case, the outcome seemed too plain and predictable, so I spent many days tossing around the idea for a plot twist.

The target audience of my animation are students who are new to university (such as myself) and those who are new to high school. The main character of my story is supposed to portray the average first-year university student: a person who is constantly under stress, very nervous, and often utterly clueless in the face of a new challenge. The ten second time bracket represents the tight schedule that students are thrown into, and while it addresses the issue, it also pokes fun at it. It was this train of thought that led to the plot twist, where it is revealed that the character is actually a student in a futurist school program for “bomb diffusing”.

Throughout the animation, I traced out images in order to attain a basic shape (i.e. the helicopters) and then changed them to fit my theme. I had my images move around with basic motion tweens, and sometimes blow up in size to give the illusion that the camera was zooming in (i.e. the skyscraper coming closer). One challenge for me was arranging every layer harmoniously without throwing them into disarray, or other finicky issues that I gradually learned to fix. For example, every time I extended the time of a certain object, it would conflict with the one that followed next. I learned to avoid this by selecting multiple layers and moving them forward at a time.

I am content with the final product of my animation, although I would have benefited from creating more scenes to build more suspense. Perhaps before having my character cut a wire, I could have cut back to the bystanders, or back to the helicopters outside. I believe this animation does address my target audience in the end, because it presents to them a basket of negative emotions (nervousness, anxiety, pressure, failure, etc) that they might deal with on a daily basis, but presents it to them in such a way that it makes them laugh. This assignment gave me a great opportunity to refresh myself with all the different aspect of using Adobe Flash, from adding sound to creating motion tweens, since I had forgotten much of what I learned about the program in high school.

Additional Comments

By doing this assignment, I have attained a new appreciation for flash animations. A fan of the short webseries "Salad Fingers" by David Firth, I can now watch his eerie animations and enjoy it doubly, because I can understand, through a certain extent of experience, the level of hard work and dedication that goes into making a flash story. Although I was not critiqued by other classmates, I did receive criticism from family and friends to whom I showed this to, and learned that I could have made each scene longer (especially the last ones, where the action moves faster) so that viewers could follow the story more closely without missing key information.