ted's year 1 blog

for everything related to my year 1 ual animation course

Month: February 2025

FINAL INTRODUCTION TO ANIMATION SUBMISSION

1st February 2025 by Kate Reeson | 0 comments


Artist’s Statement:

The transition from living in a small town, barely finding reasons to have to leave the house, to suddenly having to commute over 40 miles on a collection of buses, tubes, and trains means I’ve gone from seeing the same handful of faces, to thousands of strangers I will most likely never see more than once in my life.​
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For me, this was terrifying at first- as an outwardly queer individual who has experienced targeted hate from the public before, I worried for my safety in these environments. And while this fear has never truly subsided, I have taken to finding the glimpses of humanity wherever I can in the faces I see before me every day – for my own sake.​
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This piece aims to articulate the feeling I hold very dear to me: that we are all individuals with rich and expansive pasts, histories that are not apparent on first glance. I attempted to mimic the styles and processes that these iconic characters were originally produced with, to encapsulate the differences between each one of them. Stop-motion, paper puppet animation, traditional hand-drawn animation, and digital animation are all compiled together to create a weird, eye-catching final product. Without knowing who they are, they are simply faces in a crowd, but each one of them is so rich in history and the culmination of years of hard work and dedication.​
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I encourage you to ask why these characters are here, who you recognise, and if perceiving them as more than a face in the crowd may add to your appreciation of them in general. ​
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I find a certain beauty in taking the train every morning – so much life converges together at a single point, so normalised in its routine that no one seems to pay it any mind; the absurdity of how thousands of people from drastically different walks of life, no matter who they are or what they believe, come together with a common goal of getting from one place to another. ​
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People are so entirely self-absorbed in their own lives, living embodiments of the choices they’ve made and the traits that make them who they are, that viewing just glimpses of these people as they pass by from station to station fills me with a certain joy. I wish I could document every time I got to witness these moments, but I know that’s impossible. This is the next best thing!​’

Afterthoughts:

Overall, I am very happy with the piece as a chance to exert myself– I pushed the boat out in a myriad of different ways for this project, and doing so came with many positives, as well as several drawbacks. ​

​I am proud of my ability to get a significant amount of animation done in a small timeframe – each animated character took several hours to complete which meant several full days’ worth of animating. While I can see in hindsight that taking the time to make each animated character at least somewhat truthful to its original style was somewhat of a wasted effort (since the digital colouring essentially made most of the characters look digitally drawn, rather than drawn and inked on paper), it was a wonderful experience to be able to use some of the methods of animation I had been hoping to use since the beginning of my course.​

​I am dissatisfied with the corners I had to cut for the sake of time – for example, I had originally intended to have the foreground crowd that splits up the loop to be fully animated and coloured – with characters such as Betty Boop and some of my own personal favourites- but I simply did not have the time. Additionally, I am disappointed with how rushed the foley is, as I had many ideas for sounds I could have added – but I did not have the time to compile them. This is an issue of planning and overworking myself in certain areas. However, I will be finishing this project in my own time as I have grown quite attached to it.​

I am able to recognise that I overworked myself in the creation of this project- and there was a lot of unnecessary stress involved. This project felt like an incredibly big deal to me – it was finally a chance to put the skills I had learned to the test – and while in hindsight I realise that may not have been the case, I am still happy with my ability to self-motivate and create a cohesive end-product within a short timeframe.​

I am extremely pleased with my ability to learn Adobe After Effects – all the animation was composited in this software, and it was my first time ever using it. After Effects has always been a programme I have been interested in from afar, but too afraid to try- and I am overjoyed that I was finally able to break into it with the help from tutors and tutorials. I will undoubtedly be using the skills I have learned for future projects, and I am pleasantly surprised at some of the features it provides me as an animator.