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.
