Friday, 13 May 2016

Requested Work

I am requested to do a series of learning cards for my mother's students who are 3-6 old children who suffer from autism spectrum. These cards are going to help them from learning the orders of occasions for instance the reasons of the case, the process and the end result of the act. The cards have to be very simple and could be easily understood by kids so I use simple drawing style with less than ten colours in the drawings in order to show the information straight away. My mother describe that it could be any style and format and going to let me do more if these examples work on her students. Therefore I started to animate soon I get the job.

The first story is about a kid jumping on sofa so he fell down and need to go to the doctor. I separated the story into four parts: little boy jumping vigorously on the sofa; His mother feeling worried while he fell down; he hurts and mother is worried; he went to the doctor. Since the autistic students need to interpret the character's feelings and they will be asked about the emotions and situation from the surround within the picture therefore I have to emphasis the facial expressions of every characters in the story and need to clearly show the actions and atmosphere. I used comic expressions like water drops on head showing worry or from eyes showing sad and tears; brows movements to show emotions more specifically. The first story is all done in gif, I learnt how to make tween in photoshop and easing as well but it is not as good as aftereffect when editing, the move is jiggling but I think it is suitable for little animations like this.





The second story is also separated into four parts: little boy with his grandma go to restaurant together, he is playing toys while grandma is reading newspaper; Waiters serves two hot glass of water while the boy is playing excitingly; he knocked off the glass of hot water and burns his hand; he is sad and his grandma is so worried. As before, I animate the first two scenes in photoshop and they are in gif mode but I really want to try animating in aftereffect and see how it would make the difference. Therefore I drew all the component of the sets and put them together in Aftereffect. It is easier to animate the easing and control the timing. The animating definitely goes smoother than in gif while it also allow me to liquefied the object like spilling water. What's more, it is time consuming and the whole animation is more natural and therefore I completed the rest of the story in aftereffect and my mother is happy with either of them but personally, i prefer the Aftereffect animation.






I have learnt that it is important to respond to clients' request when doing commission work, like what style they want, what content and timing as well. Since this job is quite flexible and allow me to create without much limitation, I enjoyed it so much and have learnt some new techniques as well. However, my mother said she want the story to be linked together like online story book, so I am learning how to make that now and hope i could create some buttons for the students to click in order to choose different events or result in different story, I think it would be more interesting and integrate the students with the story.

No comments:

Post a Comment