Maddie's Magnificent Movies!- Story Animation

All of my animation career has led up to this moment.
An animation made by me with an actual plot.


Our final project to conclude our 2D Animation unit was an animation with a story, and from the moment it was announced, I was psyched for this project! As I have stated before, I have a metric ton of characters, both fan characters and completely original ones, so deciding who to use was very difficult. In the end, I settled on characters from my upcoming book series In My Element. In My Element is a series starring humanized versions of periodic table elements who live on a secret island known as Mendelevia, which is concealed from humans. So, now that you understand what the basic gist of the series is, I'll give you a brief rundown of the plot of this animation.

We start at the Central Nucleus Diner, the best (and only) diner in Mendelevia. Carly Buckley, our main character (who represents carbon) works as a waitress there. In the first scene, Carly asks the Geld sisters (who represent the Group 11 metals) what they would like to order, and Argentia Geld (who represents silver) places an extremely specific order. In the next scene, Phoebe Andersen (who represents phosphorus) states that she wants a Coca-Cola. Carly then explains that they only have Pepsi products, but Phoebe threatens Carly with a match and demands a Coke. Then, Courtney Kobold (who represents cobalt) orders 7 plays of What's New Pussycat, then 1 of It's Not Unusual, followed by another 13 of What's New Pussycat (a reference to the John Mulaney skit "The Salt and Pepper Diner). Of course, this makes Carly angry. Later, Carly is walking over to the Halogena family (who represent the halogens) to give them their food, but she trips and drops their food. Flo Halogena (who represents fluorine), the de facto leader of the Halogenas, demands they all attack Carly to get revenge, and they all beat her up. After that madness, Carly goes home, tired and grumpy after all she's been through, only to find that her brother Sidney Buckley (who represents silicon) had heard her day wasn't going well and baked her a cake. And with that, it ends.

I have to say, this went a lot better than I expected. Aside from the occasional animation error, it looks great, and all the characters turned out just like I imagined them. I've learned a lot about how to use AfterEffects to create an animation with a story. I did have to overcome some obstacles- for instance, every time I edited a new scene, I had to extend the length of the layer from 0:15 to 1:54- but it did turn out fine. I learned a lot from this, and this is the first time I've made an animation with a coherent plot, so I looks forward to doing more things like this in the future.

Maddie's Magnificent Movies!- Feature Story 2: Electric Boogaloo

Now, I had to work with a team to create this video, and my best friend Tate and I worked together to make this. Our group decided to do our feature story on the French class and the Paris trip, and I went along with it even though I wasn't in French. The first thing we did was we went down to the French room to film some B-roll, which was pretty alright. Then, Tate and I put the B-roll and the video footage together. Tate then recorded narration. 

I have to say we did pretty well with this. While this isn't our best work, it's not our worst, either. We could have done better with balancing out the audio, however.