Adobe Animate @ CalArts

Nadia Mueller

A group of school band kids showing off their talents! I really like the simplicity of cartoons and comics like Charlie Brown and Tin Tin so I wanted to make some simple cute characters that feel like little toys or figurines you’d have on your desk! I bounce between being the trumpet girl and the drummer boy, always too much energy!

I wanted to show the emotions they have through the instruments they are playing or not playing. The trumpet girl is over exerting herself, the cymbal kid is confident and annoying, the drum kid is excited, the tuba kid is tired, the flute girl is distracted, and the triangle girl is focused. 

Vivian Le

PEABO!! is a sticker pack inspired by my German Shepherd mix, Peabo. I adopted him during the pandemic so I’ve had a lot of time observing him since. I love how he’s able to convey his thoughts to me without ever speaking. I wanted to capture some of my favorite expressions and have fun with this assignment.

My goal this time was to challenge myself and try to animate more than a couple of repeating frames. In general, my favorite kind of stickers are fun and silly so I took inspiration from those. I hope viewers will get a little chuckle out of them. As far as designing goes I still wanted to keep it simple and cute. I wanted the lines to be not too varying in line thickness. I also wanted to keep the whimsy from my roughs by making the lines not super clean. I used a square brush to keep a little looseness and weird edges. I was surprised at how invested I was in capturing the emotions. I really wanted to do his expressions justice and spent more time on this than I thought I would.

Hanfei Huang

My set of emojis are called “EAT!(食多D!)”, which has seven characters eating different foods with different emotion. I came up with this idea because I miss my friends back in China and want to eat with them, thus I draw me and my friends with foods that we like. The emotion for each of my emojis are: “I need coke”, “tiredly eating fast noodle”, “man I love boba”, “help my pot is ruined”, “you want some hotpot?”, “I crave pickle”, and “furious pizza eating”. I think it would be funny to see these little animal characters eating/drinking frantically and I hope the viewers feel this too. I made these specific choices and hope people would relate to it.

It is quite easy for me to come up with a rough design because I am already familiar with these characters(each represents one of my friends). But one thing I find hard to do is to keep the color consistent so that they looks like they belong in one world, since these characters have very different designs, and I am not really good with color. Despite that, I enjoyed the overall process of making these emojis. I didn’t plan to draw the pickle emoji like Packman, but when I am animating it I find this more efficient and I like how it turns out.

Ramona Chen

The sticker pack I created is called “ Auntie Visit”. 

In Chinese, we have a slang for the period coming and we call it our auntie. I always found it cute and can’t help imagining that there’s an actual aunt who comes to visit every month. And of course, we hate her visit. The interactions between those characters gave me inspiration. Those gifs are more like little story moments and I don't think it can be actually used in the chat due to the inconsistent size. But I just would like to use this opportunity to depict an idea that has some interesting characteristics and storytelling in it.  And, I ran out of time cleaning up, so sorry for the mess. 

Rebecca Payne

“Weird Emotions for a Weird Animal” :D

For my Digital Stickers Project, I created a sticker pack called, “Weird Emotions for a Weird Animal”. It’s exactly as it sounds. Each of the six animated stickers shows our weird animal, the platypus, exhibiting weird yet somehow familiar emotions we don’t always have words for. 

Overall, I just wanted to make people laugh. I don’t expect everyone to relate to any of these emotions, but if the name of the emotion or the animation makes people laugh, I will have considered my goal fulfilled. I do think, while some of these are maybe more specific to me than to others, viewers will have experienced their own specific emotions adjacent to the ones I depicted here. 

Jay Lee

Hi! Jay here, I made a sticker pack called “School time!” for this flash class. This features two characters from my thesis animation project, Haedam and Ena. Most of them are inspired by some emotions I experienced on a daily basis throughout my college life - anticipation, hunger, panic, desire for boba, etc. 

Rachel

This is my sticker pack “Le Croissant” of my lovely dog Croissant. Spending so much time at home, I have been able to see and experience my dog's tiny quirks. Her personality has always been big and cute and I wanted to create a sticker pack that embodied this. I want users to use this sticker pack for their own enjoyment and to be reminded of their own possible little pets. 

In this pack we have Croissant in a sweater wagging her tail, Croissant swishing her wine, Croissant kicking her legs in a dream, Croissant chewing her foot, Croissant asking for pets, and Croissant sleeping with a little bear. The process came very naturally for me. I thought of the different ways Croissant acts and the best way to portray those things. I also took a lot of other inspiration from life such as her sweaters which she actually does have in reality. This allowed me to come up with a simple color palette to keep things cohesive. 

Lan

My sticker pack is named ‘Lab Lemurs’, for its main theme is about a lemur’s activities in a cintiq lab. The concept is inspired by my own and my friends’ feelings and emotions working in the computer labs - we spend so much time in these windowless spaces that they almost become our (or the lemurs’) natural habitat.

Despite the early stages including coming up with the character design, the rest of the designing process worked pretty well. I spent a lot of time doodling around, trying to decide on which character to use in these stickers. I eventually decided to use a lemur, for they have dark circles under their eyes (which resembles animation people) and constantly look anxious (which also resembles animation people).

Sumin

I chose the article “ By Exploring Virtual Worlds, AI Learns in New Ways” by Allison Whiten June 24, 2022, on Quantam magazine to do my editorial Illustration. (link: https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-makes-strides-in-virtual-worlds-more-like-our-own-20220624/) The article talks about how AIs use virtual worlds portraying the real world, like CG movie sets or  video game environments to be trained, rather than directly using real life input. Furthermore, humans could be in the virtual world to aid training AI. 

Rebecca Payne

“The Human Cost of Binge-Watching True Crime Series”

https://time.com/5825475/true-crime-victim-families/

This article details the effects of the true crime media industry, ranging from documentaries and books on the families and surviving victims who were affected by the real life events. 

This article discusses the potential benefits of bringing these cases to light, such as in the case of “Unsolved Mysteries”, a long-standing series that would re-open cold cases and broadcast them to the world, in the hopes that someone who knows anything about the case could assist in it being solved.

By and large, however, the families of the victims are rarely, if ever, consulted or notified before the release of a documentary about the killing of their loved ones. This is because many murder cases, once closed, are public domain. Whenever a new piece of media emerges, it reopens all the scars that came with the brutal loss of a loved one. 

Michelle (Miv) Choi “​​Humans Are Walloping Sea Creatures With Deadly, Disorienting Noise” https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/02/humans-are-walloping-sea-creatures-with-deadly-disorienting-noise/

Published: February 5, 2021

I chose to illustrate Mother Jones’ article on how “​​Humans Are Walloping Sea Creatures With Deadly, Disorienting Noise.” The article describes how noise pollution emitted from humans is detrimental to marine life. Due to the acoustic environment being fundamental to the ecosystem’s natural balance, many species are negatively impacted by fishing vessels and military detonations. This is particularly evident with various whale species. Because whales rely on songs as a form of communication for reproduction and hunting, the disorienting sonar waves disrupt their means of livelihood. 

Illustration by: Vivian Le

Article: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/19/23312913/worldwide-bicycle-commute-netherlands-climate-change

Title: To fight climate change, we need to start biking like the Dutch

Author: Justine Calma

Publication: The Verge

Date of Publication: August 19, 2022

The article talks about a study done in the Netherlands where if a person bikes 1.62 miles a day instead of driving then that can reduce carbon emissions by one-fifth. It aims to uplift readers to try and bike more and potentially do their part in fighting climate change, which is what drew me to the article. I wanted to create an illustration that feels empowering.

Nadia-

https://www.seventeen.com/life/a34645386/teens-take-charge-nyc-equality-education/ 

These New York City Teens Are Fighting for Equality in Education

By Danielle Tullo

Published by Seventeen, February 3, 2021

In NYC teens are facing racial discrimination in the screening process for private schools. These schools are judging applicants based off of extracurricular activities that are not provided in schools with predominantly students of color. These teens are fed up with their schools not providing them with the programs they need and the biased screening systems that keep them from entering schools that do. This loop hole allows for the continuation of systemic racism in education.

The most important factor is that these schools have space for these girls, but they are being kept out by arbitrary rules. I thought it would be an interesting visual to have Venn diagram where the circles are fighting against one another with a desk in the middle to show the available space they want to fill. In one version I added the city, but I also liked keeping it simple with just the outlines of the circles. Stylistically I wanted to create something that evoked early 2000s flash websites for girls like Barbie.com

I extremely enjoyed discovering new features and brush strokes, and I found the program inspiring the choices I made. I did find it challenging when I needed to make a big picture change to the color or layout, I kept accidentally moving and painting things when I didn’t mean to which made this take longer than I wanted. Now I know to lock all my layers! 

Rachel

How listening to Silence Changes our brains

By:  Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz

Published by TIMES, September 8 2022

This article explores how silence is essential to our developmental brains. Today's noise pollution is 6 times louder than they were a century ago. Due to this, health issues and stress levels are much higher leading to lower levels of productivity and success.

In my illustration I wanted to explore the contrast of silence against the world. The forest represents peace and serenity. The cityscape represents the modern world and its everyday noise. For my color choices, I wanted to have a clear contrast of serenity by using bright and saturated colors and the “noise” being a bit more muted and mundane. Overall, my goal was to make the character in the illustration very peaceful with the world that surrounds her. 

Jay here!

An editorial illustration based on the New York article  <It’s Never Too Late to Uproot Your Life and Open an Inn> by Alix Strauss, September 6, 2022 (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/06/style/catskill-mountains-phoenicia-lodge.html). It’s about Maureen McNamara and her wife, Jennifer Stark, now both 60, who opened the Phoenicia Lodge in the Catskill Mountains of New York in early 2020. 

Hanfei

Queer Theory meets Archaeology, https://books.google.com/books?hl=zh- CN&lr=&id=WPzOCwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA277&dq=queerness+in+archaeology&ots=3-oyyCDMsg&sig=vIGDSgDTzVmQdWncW31uQsM- Sr0#v=onepage&q=queerness%20in%20archaeology&f=false

The article that I am illustrating for is called Queer Theory meets Archaeology: Disrupting Epistemological Privilege and Heteronormativity in Constructing the Past, by British archaeologist Thomas Dowson, who is queer himself. This article is included in a book on LGBTQ topic, called The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, published in 2009 by Ashgate Publishing Limited. The article talks about discrimination against people of LGBTQ community in Archaeology, including mistreatment against the academics themselves, and denial of LGBTQ topics when researching, I picked the second theme as the theme of my illustration.

One challenge I experienced is to come up with a design. Because this article talks about lots of heavy and big topic, these are more theoretical than literal, at first I find it hard to find a focus, to visually show how archaeology hasn’t been very friendly towards the LGBTQ community. Then I go over the article again to find specific examples that’s more visual to illustrate, and finally pin it down.

The example I choose is about a case in Egypt, where archaeologists discovered a tomb with two men buried together in the same fashion as husbands and wives. Archaeologists believe they were very close brothers, and blame people who say they might be in a same-sex relationship for “using history to promote contemporary politics”. I find this example very interesting, and I think this can make a fun illustration. To visually show this story, I came up with two designs. In the first design I draw an Egyptian man literally coming out of a closet, and an archaeologist telling him to go back. The second design, which is also the one I choose, I make the point more straightforward by drawing the archaeologist nailing the coffin lid so the gay Egyptian man cannot come out. I used rainbow color for the Egyptian’s necklace so to indicate his identity, and also not losing the Egypt