Virus
Award
2020 Grand Prize winner of COVID Creative contest
by The Greenspring Review and Arts Alive.
the assignment
During COVID-19 my senior class was getting ready for our capstone exhibition. One of the ways we prepared was by getting the word out using Instagram and YouTube. The YouTube channel especially suffered because we couldn’t film our fellow students. Our group leader tried to get people to submit videos of themselves working at home, but it was taking time. We needed something to keep people’s interest in Capstone 2020.
The video was created in response to Corona, but had to be kept light-hearted to not accidently make a statement. It also needed be about Capstone coming.
the process
The Character: It was inspired by two things. One, it needed to be kept simple in order to animate it quickly. Two, I really drew insparation from Pixar’s Mike Wazowski.
Color Choice: Complementary colors used with all the characters. It doesn’t look it, but each character has two colors. An example, the main character is green (becuase the color is associated with sickness) and its iris is red. That contrast makes the eye pop more, which is important since it’s the most expressive feature.
Storyboards: How to show a virus grow up? It’s the question I started with and kept in mind as I thought of what people went through in life and how to transition between stages.
Animating: The last part before it is handed off to be uploaded to YouTube. it was a lot of fun, but i needed a lot of compositions to keep the scenes straight. Since the puppet tool was used, its limitations had to be recognized so the virus didn’t look rubbery.
the challange
Remembering all the animation principles that applied. Here squash and stretch, staging, appeal, exageration, and follow through/overlapping action were most important. With the green virus, everytime it stepped/hopped forward the body went up and the spikes had to go down and when the body went down the spikes had to move up. Also, while the body moved up and down it was squashing and stretching slightly to give it more elasticity and believability. While all that was going on with the body, the iris and the pupil moved. This was the most challanging, but it was also so much fun having to train my mind to remember all of this.
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