Title: Original animation in Adobe Animate and ToonSquid
Audience: General
Date: Ongoing
Software Utilized for the Projects: Adobe Animate, ToonSquid, Audacity, and Camtasia
About the Project: Having learned how to animate training videos with Vyond as part of my instructional design coursework, I became interested in animation from scratch. Using an all-access pass to Bloop Animation classes, Adobe Animate, Audacity, and Camtasia, I began creating my own animations.
My animation skills are a work in progress. I have a solid understanding of the technical skills and I am currently exploring how to use the technology in a way that works with the limitations of my drawing skills. I can draw, but I cannot draw the same thing over and over as is required in frame-by-frame animation.
The first two examples of animation are exercises in digital storytelling while the third is instructional in nature.
Masque of the Red Death
This video was created in fall of 2023 using the text from the last paragraph of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” Each scene was drawn in Adobe Animate and compiled in Camtasia. The sound was created in Audacity with music from the Storyblocks database.
“Bad Mom”
This animated short is entirely original from a short essay I wrote a few years ago. It was begun in the summer of 2023 and completed in the summer of 2024. I was striving for a “minimum viable product” and achieved slightly more than that. Not all of the drawing is my best, but it tells the story I wanted to tell.
I recorded the audio in Audacity, the music is from the Storyblocks database, and the scenes were compiled in Camtasia.
Summary of John Polidori’s “The Vampyre”
When I taught my first-year seminar on vampires, my students struggled to understand the 200-year-old prose of this short story, the official first English-language story about vampires. If I were to teach the course again, I would point them to specific parts of the text (perhaps using Perusall) that described the vampire, Lord Ruthven, and be able to watch this video for the overarching story.
These animations from scratch are very time consuming and impractical for a replacement to programs such as Vyond. However, from-scratch animation affords almost unlimited flexibility for creating short original animations when what is needed is outside of Storyline’s motion graphics or Vyond’s animation capabilities. Such animation is already frequently used in educational videos such as PBS’s video on civil engineering or videos by Kurzgesagt.
I can see from-scratch animation being useful in explaining how a piece of machinery works, for example, so that the machine in the video matches what learners will use in real life.
2D animation has become a passion, and I am interested in exploring 3D animation. I have begun learning 3D modeling and very basic animation on Blender: