Doing something completely new to us using computation.
For our final project this year we were assigned the Impossible Project. The point to the project is to challenge us to do something with computation that we have next to no knowledge about and document the process. My initial plan was to make a light and sound reactive stuffed toy (inspired by my niece), but given the quarantine I didn't have access to the resources I needed for it. So it switched ideas! Instead I decided to work fully digitally. I see cute little animations on social media all of the time, and wanted to do one of my own. Looking further into the creators of such animations I found that they all used procreate on the iPad-a program that I just started learning this semester! It was a perfect opportunity to learn more and try something completely new. Although I have experience with flash animation from high school, the process of drawing frame by frame for animation was foreign to me, and so made the perfect thing to focus on for my project.
When I first decided to work with Procreate I had no idea how people animated on it. It has a very simple interface and I had never seen anything to do with animation before. After some searching I found an option for "Animation Assist" in the settings. This opened up a timeline at the bottom of the screen where i could add layers and adjust the speed of my animation, as well as a helpful onionskin tool. This animation program was similar to Photoshop (that we learned in class this year) in that the frames came from the layers. I found the Procreate interface more straight forward, and possibly more accessible to students if you have access to iPads for lessons.
The tutorial I used.
To start animating in Procreate, these are the settings you need.
The way I started my animation was by making an initial drawing in Procreate. I made sure my lines looked good, then duplicated the layer. The onion skin feature of the animation assist allowed me to see my first drawings position, which would be the first frame. Then, erasing the parts I wanted to move and redrawing them for the second frame. My first animation was only 2 frames on loop so it was pretty simple. This method of animation made me feel less pressure than drawing every aspect of each frame fresh. It makes it fairly easy to animate short and simple things like facial expressions, and would be a good way for students to practice simple animation that more fun than just a bouncing ball.
After the lines and basic animation was done I was able to add flat color and some shadows. This was done in basically the same way, by making new layers and duplicating and adjusting for each frame. However, a problem I ran into was that by making a new color layer it became a whole new frame in the animation. I realized that if I grouped each line art with its color it made those all count as one frame. The combine option allowed you to keep the color and lines separate in case you made any changes later, as opposed to merging layers which would make everything one image and harder to edit. My second animation was done in the same way as the first, though with 4 frames, and one duplicated to give it a smoother loop. I feel like the easiest part of the process was the drawing of frames themselves, and the hard part was with the function of the program. Though the Procreate interface is really simple, it also makes it harder to find exactly what everything does. It involved a lot of trial and error (like with the layer combining), googling, and talking to classmates for how they got something to work.
Animation 1
Animation 2
I consider this project "finished" at the moment, though that wasn't the goal of the Impossible Project. As of right now I have two animations done and am presenting on May 7th. I am planning on doing one or two more before my presentation date with more frames in each. The way I'm going to present is by sharing my screen on Zoom and playing the animations. I'm going to try and share my iPad screen as well and go through the layers and how the animation is done in program. There may be some complications as I have a windows computer, but I'll figure out something.
While working on these animations I was keeping in mind how this could translate to a future classroom lesson. Though the assignment itself is pretty simple, good for middle school and up, the major problem is accessibility. Not every student will have access to an iPad, and even less will have access to Procreate, which is $10 on the app store. That is cheap for an art program, but for people that wouldn't use it regularly it could be hard to justify the purchase. Hopefully by the time I graduate schools will have much more technology at their disposal and be able to extend that to art programs. The field of art is quickly shifting to more digital than traditional, and schools are going to have to adapt to that too. I know there are already some schools currently that check out iPads to every student, so I don't think its too out of the realm of possibility that it could become more widespread (and accessible to art classes) in the next few years. Schools are already changing how much they put into the arts. At my high school we had ten drawing tablets total, but by the time I graduated we had double in addition to access to adobe creative suite on every school computer. The way our society is putting a lot of emphasis on creating right now makes me think that schools will start to consider the arts more essential than in the past (which has led to the programs getting cut all together in some districts). Now, I think since we're seeing the arts as a more marketable skill, schools and parents are willing to encourage their kids to put more effort into visual art to become animators or illustrators or graphic designers.
And what comes next with this? Well, I for sure plan on animating more. I used to hate animating when I was doing it in Flash and avoided it for years. Now I know it can actually be a fairly simple, fun experience. Through this project I went from feeling severely frustrated with things not working quite right, to joy when I puzzled it out. Not only did I learn so many new ways to utilize this program and computers for art, but I also know how to have fun while doing it. In my future teaching practice I want to try and do something similar with my students, and would definitely recommend to any teacher with the resources for it!