Sebastian Castilho

This project really did take me to hell and back. I tried so many different techniques and software – rotoscoping, hand drawn, flash, photoshop… All gave nice results but just didn’t suit what I wanted to do.

In the end, in a moment of true Chinese wisdom, I realised that it wasn’t the method that had me stuck, but the actual idea for the animation! All along I had these ideas in my head:

The tune is actually quite a sweet, flowing piece of music. Good to animate some sort of love story!

I did the best I could with what time I had left. The animation is lacking, but I made up for it with some nice use of colour (a requirement of the assingment) Unfortunately I didn’t actually manage to finish the whole thing, but I got far enough. What was eventually supposed to happen was a Mario-style rescue of Prince Peach from the hands of Bowser!

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It seems impossible for me to convert the flash file into a video format, so here are screengrabs instead.

Press play:

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This is one of six different music tracks I could choose to make a music video of.

I’m finding it insanely hard.

Let’s go through my usual hoops of making a project.

1. Receive brief. Yay! this sounds fun.
2. Make first notes on what to do.
3. Procrastinate for a while.
4. Suddenly get a load of different ideas.
5. Become spoilt for choice on ideas.
6. Suddenly decide I just need to do it.

I’ve just reached phase 6, and I need to show something substantial on Monday. Grim times.

Basically I could just hand draw the animation, but it would take an incomprehensible amount of time (see this post) to make over 2 minutes of animation. So what I’ve decided to do is use mostly Flash. Back in the day when I was 14 when my brain was like a sponge, I could learn new programs quite easily. Now it’s a different story!

Wish me luck.