What is a Pocket Penz?
When I was in high school I created my first art Instagram: Pocket Penz, inspired by my habit of having a pen in my pocket at all times, just in case I had a spare moment to draw something from the world around me.
Fast forward to my senior year of college and I’ve opened up a sticker shop on Etsy selling my own designs with the purpose of sharing my sense of adventure and love of story telling with others.
For this project I wanted to practice making advertisements that mixed short snippets of live action and animation in order to promote my business, but also to sharpen the skills I need to do client work in the future.
My original goal was three animations each promoting a different sticker. However, due to time constraints, I paired it down to two animations: one vertical and one horizontal.
The Adventure: Final Product
Every Hero Has Their Dragons.
Scope was the biggest challenge for this project. Animation takes a lot of time that I just did not have for something like this.
My original idea for the bookshelf video was a 360 shot that transformed a live action setting into animation as the camera swung from behind the subject to see their face. My mentor, Cory Kerr, kindly reminded me that something like that is on par with the most complicated shot from the matrix. Pulling that concept off was not in my budget for time or money.
Because it took time for me to narrow down the scope of the project, I lot of my preproduction ended up not seen in the final product. That can seem disheartening, but preproduction in where you want to kill these ideas and grow from them (before you make even bigger or expensive mistakes).
Project processes.
The hardest thing for young videographers and filmmakers to grasp is the idea of planning. The urge to just grab a camera and go is powerful. However, the more projects you make and the more you work with others, the more you value planning and communication. It is even more important in animation.
It doesn’t remove the possibility of all mistakes, but it avoids the big ones.
It helped me decide how to bring in animated elements in a way that isn’t jarring from storyboard. It helped me consider if I can change the lighting of a scene practically or if I should attempt it as part of the animation.
For this project with so many assets, this preproduction required a lot of sketching and ideation.
I went back and forth between sketches and filming the raw footage to animate on top of, making sure that the assets I was making worked with the live action.
Then, I spent countless hours creating an airship and bookshelves. The following timelapses were recorded over a little more than a month for just the airship assets.
After I had all of the assets prepared, it was time to open After Effects and put it all together.
Inertial Bounce expression from Harry J. Frank
An overview of the experiences you had.
This project was a delight. I sharpened my skills in Adobe Illustrator and After Effects and gained good portfolio pieces that will be able to use as examples for my motion graphics experiences.
I overcame my own ambition and also got better at sharing progress videos on social media, building my network and online presence. This is something I would like to continue in the future.
There and Back Again: A Tale of Lessons Learned.
Just because you can think something, does not make it easy or feasible. There’s a reason animation takes a long time to look decent and even longer to look good. There is also a direct correlation between the time and effect you put into something and how much your skills improve.
I can’t wait to create more videos like this in the future.