I'm probably over-simplifying my plight because I can "sort-of-draw," and I've taken art and drawing classes throughout my years and understand certain basics, but I'm definitely not an illustrator and I am not constantly honing my illustrative skills like the animation or graphic design students at my school. Also, as a film student, there aren't even any drawing classes required--but, based on the requirements that are demanded of us in our animation classes, I think that there should be.
The project that I'm working on is a 30 second opening sequence for my school's student news program. It's supposed to represent Sacramento, student news, and our school (The Art Institute of California, Sacramento). Writing a general outline for it, I can do. Writing a script for it, I can do. Storyboarding stick-figures, scribbles, and blobs with labels arrowed to them I can do. But creating good quality graphics that I can animate and apply 3D animation to? Meh... makes my stomach hurt. I can do some things, but they take a really, really long time.
As a matter of fact, this yellow bridge (meant to represent The Tower Bridge in downtown Sacramento) took me pretty much five hours.
It took so long because I did research on the bridge first, looked up some examples of vector bridge images, and then tried to create my bridge in Illustrator. Fail. Once upon a time I used to know how to use Illustrator... now, not so much. So, after wasting a good amount of time in Illustrator, I gave up and headed over to Photoshop. I still had some trouble trying to create a "cut out" effect for the white space, and it took a lot of swapping between colors, painting things back in, selecting, erasing, etc... to get it to look somewhat how I wanted it to.
I have a bunch more images to create, and it's boggling my mind. I should have started this project much earlier (it's due tomorrow!) but knowing my limits I could not come up with an idea that I could actually follow through with. All week I had all of these really cool ideas for an opening sequence... but after storyboarding each idea, I realized that there was no way I could pull them off without stronger skills in drawing and animation. Bummer. So, yesterday I managed to re-vamp all of my creative ideas, simplify them, and came up with something I thought I might be able to do. I started working on the project this morning, thinking I would have time.
Unfortunately the idea I have in mind still seems really complicated to me, but it's the most simple one I have come up with yet and now there's no time to think of another. I guess we'll see what I can do in After Effects after I have all of the images created. *sigh*
To make matters worse, I've been sick all day with asthma without much relief from my inhalers. *boo* I also have to get up at 6:00AM... or not sleep at all... or ditch class from my utter humiliation and failure. One or the other. But, let's end this post on a positive note!
A note of positivity: Look at that beautiful yellow bridge! :)
