Ringling Precollege: Drawing for Animation- Character design, storyboards, and whatnot

Okay so this was the class I was most excited about because my teacher, Billy Merritt, was someone I really admired even before precollege so getting to know him as my professor was an amazing experience as he was a Ringling alumni and worked at Pixar for 10 years. In our first assignment we used these abstract shapes to create our own characters which is a lot harder than it sounds, then from those characters within the shape we chose we changed the proportions to emphasize cetain characteristics giving our characters personalities, mine I got very into which was good thing and I think Billy knew how hard I worked on this and how much I believed in this character.

We then took a video from youtube and found key fames in a single movement from the video and put our characters in the figures movement( mine was someone wiping out on a boogie board because my characters large-clawlike hands make him really clumsy)

lastly, we had to create a storyboard using our character in which they discover a package or gift for them. I used to to show more of my characters personality and how they environment they live in reacts to them, he's treated like a freak because of his large hands and his shell, his adoptive father is a fisherman who pulled him up in a net of hermit crabs and shellfish , he's supposed to have a bright blue shell(however all out work was in black and white) that the fisherman put aside to sell not realizing that it was a child, the shell's too small for him at this point in the story and he wants to leave his father's fishing company to see the world but his shell's no longer a home and is more of a paper weight to him now, holding him back.

My Ringling Precollege Computer Animation Work

Hello! So at Precollege, in order to squeeze in as much education into our minds as possible on whatever courses we chose we alternated between our two Immersion courses every day (with no class on the weekends except optional open labs). Anyway our first assignment was a still life we picked from the internet and then had to recreate using Maya, mine was so horrible I'm choosing not to post, sorry. Our second assignment was a simple ball bounce and then a robot animation with a model of our own design, however the only way to upload any of these projects is by rending it and then pulling it up in Adobe Premiere and converting it into an mp4 file and we didn't do that for any of  the animations thus far(the robot and the ball bounce). After this we animated our first Primitive Theater with a new model of our own design and by using Blendshapes for the first time, my model was similar to my robot because I liked the squishiness of my alien, here's my first Primitive Theatre

After this we became more comfortable with the software, Maya an now Premiere. Ed(my CA professor) gave us our first rig named Simple guy which we were to use to create another Primitive Theater with, with our own environment and lighting as the last one had as well. we also got used to this rig by creating a walk cycle with it--which was never uploaded to Premiere and wont be uploaded but here's my final Primitve Theatre