Aedi (The ultimate crossover animation):
My biggest none-brief based project, this is not a short experiment like the others were, this was a passion project to create an animated film like no other. This was to be a film for my final year at university as you get to create a film with full creative freedom, even creating your own brief, but due to inconsistent theming and other requirements, this film was unable to represent the end of my journey within university.
Despite that, I did use a lot of time to create this film, even generating pre-production for it too to make this a more professional film despite being only made by myself. The story consists of characters from my past animated films, including the turtle from the Rio film, the Post It notes from my first stop motion film, the figures from my RSA film and the boxer which comes from some of my boxing animations. All these characters get ripped from their own worlds to benefit the imagination of a struggling animator, Aedi (which is backwards for 'IDEA'), really showing how he is reworking other work to make his own as shown in his introduction followed by other scenes. All the kidnapped characters are taken into a prison where they will be converted into green creative energy, and despite a nearly successful escaping plan with all the characters getting on, Aedi pauses his own work to come to complete his scheme once the Hunter becomes unable to finish the job.
Before Aedi was able to finish his job, the Post It notes manage to free everyone, including myself from the prison's grip, and so I beat Aedi in a fight, and even give him a book which contains advise for Aedi, to show that he could do with forming his own inspirations rather than trying to twist the work of others, and he does so in the end, as well as the rest of my characters coming back to where they belong. So, this is certainly the biggest narrative, after all, I did want to create a more complex story, and this is what could be the best piece of media of mine to show how much of passionate storyteller I am. being able to create a sympathetic villain, allowing time for the characters to get to know one another as well as building up the narrative followed by a resolution once the main obstacles are out the way. As well as the whole crossover aspect involving four previously established characters, there are references of past films too which includes, Aedi's rip off animation referencing my cat lady music video, my cube spell coming from my first ever film, my building spell which comes from the VR Dover film as well as my flip flop blade which is obvious for where that comes from.
This film does have a collection of techniques including masking for the portals, decent compositing of 2D characters onto 3D settings (not to mention using keyframes for better interaction like them squidging them slightly for when they land on the ground) alongside more abstract cases of Photoshop animations such as spells have never been something I have animated before. Not to mention that I would argue that this film does have the best action so far in my collection of films. If I had to come with improvements is that the human like characters do move in ways which are too similar as well as having similar body builds, some of the sound of music editing could have been better, especially some of the volume being inconsistent, the characters could have required more detail and the spells could have been more distinct e.g. glowing effects. this film once again used Autodesk to form some of the settings, assets and I even used a newly animated 3D blue figure to draw on top of it to make it a blue 2D animated figure from my RSA film.
Photoshop was mainly used to animate the likes of spells, form some of the settings, and this is where I did draw on top of my footage again to make all the movement as natural as possible, except the turtle was done via scratch alongside minor references to make its animation work just as well as the rest of the characters. After Effects also helped merge everything together like the appliance of stop motion, various transitions, colour grading as well as making all the character abilities far more grounded. Speaking of colour grading, even this film embodies blues and reds in its own way, with blue represent my creations and red representing anything reguarding Aedi. Even Aedi being a creature which is made up of squiggly lines is part of the evolution of the many characters I have animated. This film took roughly about six months, which proves that this is the biggest none brief based film to make.
Despite its flaws, an animation that is representative of your own brand as well as crossing over characters from past media of mine, it truly makes this animation special, and it would be interesting if anyone else attempts to make a crossover animation of their own, making my film a small step in the long history of animation, it's no doubt that this is a favourite of mine, as well as being favoured by a lot of acquaintances too.