Annie Y. Amaya

We had a private little exclusive “premiere” of Why Do Flowers Die? in one my old professor’s class, presented along with all my past student films. It always humbles me to present both old and new work, because you see how much you’ve changed as an artist. I had one student ask me, “What advice would you give for someone starting out?” All I can say is, just keep at it. You’ll get there if you dedicate yourself to your work. I’ve got a long way to go before I can call myself a master of my craft. Animation isn’t easy, but if you like it, it’s extremely rewarding.

The film is officially complete!

It’s been a long journey creating this film, but I sincerely enjoyed every part of the process. It was a refreshing feeling to be able to work on a film for an entire year instead of the usual semester. It allowed me to go in depth with each step, all the way from pre-production to post-production, so experience I gained from this is extremely valuable. 

One thing that I am most proud of is my collaboration with my peers. It is quite a difficult thing to let go of your personal project and allow other people to add their touch. In the more general sense of collaboration, the in-class critiques were always useful and humbling, and it was a source of bonding for our class. Of course, a more direct form of collaboration was with my background artist, Teresa, and my composer, Nick. In both cases, I am happy that our collaboration worked out very smoothly and we have all finished the year, content with the final product. It was an invaluable experience where I learned the importance of good directing. It can never be a dictatorship, because it is truly a partnership. This film could not have finished in such a short span of time and as high in quality if it weren’t for all those who helped me create it. Whether it was verbal feedback in a classroom setting, or getting a homemade pizza personally delivered from Antonio when I was sick (seriously though–thank you), every single gesture and input has helped me. I am just as sad that it’s over just as I am happy. I will miss working on Rose, and I will certainly miss my classmates. 

A huge, huge thank you to everyone. 

Here are some beautiful backgrounds done by Teresa Kuo! (You can follow her work at @tweedacaramel )

I’ve begun compositing the animation and backgrounds together, and boy is it thrilling to see everything slowly come together. I think compositing will be one of my favourite parts for this film! (Like it always is.)

Animatic to Rough Animation

Here I have edited together different versions of the same scene from my previous post. Even after the story is decided, there are so many ways to tell that story. This is why animatics are crucial for a smooth production, so that these changes can be made earlier rather than later. 

The first change was the composition of the first few shots. As mentioned before, the pan in the first version is unnecessary, and actually creates more confusion than it does clarify Rose’s emotions. There are a variety of different techniques to help focus your audience’s eye on specific elements, a pan being one, but a close-up and a cut to a wider shot serves this scene better. This way, we see the whole scene and not bit by bit, which allowed me to show Rose’s reaction more directly. 

In the same way, adding in close ups of the Rose’s face as she grabs the petal shows her emotion, rather than relying on the sigh to communicate all of it. Adding a variety to sequences of shots from close ups to farther shots creates more dynamism and keeps it interesting. For this particular film, I rarely use far away shots because of the intimacy of the story. We are always emotionally close to the characters. As well, a child’s world is rather like a tight-knit community, especially for a character like Rose who is still very naive and young. As they learn, their world expands along with their knowledge. 

Colour script is finished!

Making the colour script was a very enjoyable process, and it’s very satisfying to see the entirety of the film laid out in this format. It’s exciting to see the film come together slowly! 

Why Do Flowers Die? - A Short Film

This year is the final year of my studies at Concordia University for my BFA in Film Animation, which means I am making my final, thesis film. The only requirement is that it is a minimum of a minute in length, and the rest is very much open themed.

I decided to challenge myself and write a screenplay from scratch, which is something I have never done before. My past films have always either been based on already existing stories (myths, legends, etc.) or is an autobiographical piece in the sense that I took personal experiences and turned them into a film. Because of this, the story has become a very important–if not, the most important–part of the film. It will be the primary focus as I get into its production. 

What you see here is an animation test that I did over the summer before the school term started during my preparation for the upcoming year. I had one main idea that acted as the root of the story, from which the characters and the rest of elements have stemmed out from. In fact, it was more a question than it was an idea. The question was, why do we give flowers to people as gifts, when they simply die?

Final project is finished! 

I tried to incorporate all the techniques that I’ve learned throughout the term. Everything is made within After Effects with no outside footage, which was I challenge that I set for myself. This time, because there was music to work with, it added an extra layer of work to be able to sync the effects to the beat of the song. Overall, it was a good learning experience and I am looking forward to applying the knowledge to future works. 

Project file: download

 Exercise #3: Solar Atmosphere

This tutorial focuses on the fractal and turbulent displacement effects, and then layering multiple copies of the same comp. It very briefly touched on expressions since they were used for parenting the rotation values of the sun-globe to the camera position. It could be really interesting to play around with more expressions to create more controls. The spherizing effect used to create the sun-globe has its limits, since the poles can clearly been seen, but it works for simple camera moves. 

Tutorial: VideoCopilot - “Solar Atmosphere”

Project file: download

Exercise #4: Advanced 3D Light Rays

This was a pretty neat tutorial about using lights with type to create a faux-3D effect. Few things I added that weren’t in the tutorial were lens flare and flash effects, and also some animation on the camera, the smoke, the spot light, and the highlights on the text. 

Tutorial: “Advanced 3D Light Rays”

Project file: download

Exercise #2: Rain effects 

The original tutorial goes as far as adding lightning and gory explosion effects, but I was only looking for ways to create rain effects. There was also another tutorial on sky replacement that I had to reference, since it was mentioned in the storm tutorial. (Links for both below!) Most of the extra tweaks I added that weren’t included in the tutorials were for colour correction, and a few blur effects on the rain. 

Tutorial links: “Lightning Strike”, “Advanced Sky Replacement”