A Little Taste of the "Creative Process" With Ninjas

     So as most of you are aware, I am actually a junior in the DMA, animation program. As such, one of my classes this semester is the "Junior Project." In this class, we are currently producing 5-second short films. The objective of the class is to get a feel for client-to-artist relationships in the professional world as well as learn all the necessary steps in taking a piece from its conception to finished, concrete, professional quality work. 
     The process is divided into four parts lasting one week each: story beats, animatic/color concept, layout reel, and final product. We meet with the professors, who act as our clients, once a week to bring them up to speed on our work. For the story beat segment, we are given a theme to base our project on and it is our job as artists to come up with three different ideas for it. To quickly, but effectively, get our ideas across, we use story beats. Story beats are single frames that display the key actions of our idea, we are limited to 5 beats for our projects, but sometimes are given exceptions to that rule (1 beat-per-second of film). The second stage is animatic/color concept. Here we take our 5 beats and flesh them out into a moving picture, the most important part of an animatic is getting the timing of your piece down, each event needs to happen precisely when it is supposed to in the the final work. Animation quality is not required yet, but it needs to be readable; sound is also added at this stage. For color concept, you need to be able to present still images that are accurate or almost accurate representations of your final "look" as well as present multiple different options for colors in your final look. Next is layout reel. It is at this stage of the game that you take your film to the final medium that you will use to create your piece. For example, if you are making your film 3D, then you would start building your base scene in a 3D program, and start performing animation tests so you will be ready for the final push to the finish line, which brings us to the last step, finished product. The last week is spent polishing everything to look professional and complete. It is vitally important that you don't lose steam on the project at any point in this process because that can easily lead to the project lacking quality, or never being finished at all.

     Here is an example of one of my pieces that never got finished. The theme was that the animation must begin as a square and end as a square. Myself and my partner, Thomas Edwards, came up with two ideas in the beat process that were strong enough to go into animatic, but this one was eliminated after we decided to pursue the other as the stronger animation. This piece however has a lot of potential, and we could finish it at a later date. So without further ado, I give you Ninja-in-a-Box(Working title).