The first week we were introduced to animation. We learned about Disney’s 12 animations rules (here’s the link for them) http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/anim_principles.html. We then got our stanzas and came up with a storyboard with our ideas for what we could do. The stanza that we had was” “They soon understood that first comes and exhalation jubilee that ecstasy of that introductory spark maybe soon there will be fireworks inhale one long inhale swallowing the spark whole i wonder if they understood when they pulled of their fingernails torn flesh burned cigarettes on their skin, when they drove them into the cold and blackness”

When first reading this stanza we immediatly had a vision of how we wanted to set this up. We then drew out a story board consisting of all the scenes we wanted to add in our final piece. We then layed out the story board and had Derek and Amro cretique it. After we had our main idea set up it was time to create an animated story board on after effects that would generally capture the idea and timing of what we wanted to do. 

Learning after effects was a difficult process at first, but we were quickly able to pick it up. After storyboarding we felt very confident with my after effects skills. We set up a general animation that began with a person blowing away the bars of a jail cell, and ended with a hand being burned by a cigarette. For the most part our ideas were great, but we still needed some tweaking. After taking out unnesessary things we were finally able to create this video for real. We then began redoing all of the scenes and making them perfect for the final product. 

One challenge that we had was the fireworks scene. Originally, on the story board, we just had a bunch of fireworks getting sucked into a hole, but we found that that idea was too literal. We needed a setting for the fireworks. We started with a silhouette of a group of people celebrating infront of the fireworks. Then, we changed the idea to hands moving side to side. Once we watched the hands, it was very difficult to tell what they were doing and it did not look right so we decided to change the idea again. Finally, we came up with the idea to use a silhouette of a Syrian skyline which ended up really benefitting the overall project. The skyline was able to subtley set the scene. 

Overall, we had a great experience creating this animation. After all of the time and effort we put into only 30 seconds of a video we now have new respect for animatiors.