ATHENA
This short 3-minute teaser trailer was a semester-long group project that I and my other 3 team members worked on.
Our project, Athena, portrays our own original hero character. The trailer is animated in both two dimensional and three-dimensional sequences with a music score and narration, using the Adobe Creative Cloud software, as well as, Blender, ZBrush, Fusion 360, Maya, Substance Painter, and Logic Pro X. The 2D animation serves to represent our character's backstory, and the 3D animation represents the present day.
I was the lead 2D artist and animator for this project. That means I basically developed all the 2D art for our video and took the task of animating each scene. I also animated the end credits and edited the whole video together.
Outlined below is my process for completing my part of the project:
One of the hardest parts of a creative team project is having all team members unanimously agree on an idea to execute. This task took our team roughly two weeks, where we all needed to comprise some of our own art styles in order to create a cohesive project. We all agreed on creating a short teaser trailer for our own original heroin where we introduce her backstory in 2D and then show her in the present in 3D.
Afterward, it was my task to take the story we have decided on and sketch out a general storyboard for the 2D animated scenes. See the image below. This was my first iteration and you can certainly see that the end result is more detailed.
After establishing our story, I began digitally drawing out each panel using Photoshop. The first iteration of these panels were very simple. This helped me quickly sketch out all the panels I needed for this project to share with the rest of my team who were responsible for the 3D portion of the story. This helped ensure that both the 2D and 3D parts of the project were cohesive and exhibited the same art style. After all my panels were drawn out, I went back and added details to the backgrounds in order to establish a better sense of space, and general details to make my art really stand out. Below is an example of my first iteration panel (left) versus my final iteration:
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The final step of my 2D animation part was actually animating my panels! This was done solely using Adobe After Effects. Some of the visual effects such as smoke and fire had to be animated in Photoshop since they required frame by frame drawing. My animation also went through a lot of iterations in order to ensure that I had a perfectly polished video. I had professionals in my industry critic my work throughout the semester. Their advice and my hard work and creativity helped me create a very emotional and exciting 2D animated video that I am proud of showcasing in conjunction with the rest of the elements that my team had created.