Making of 2D Short Movie - In The Pursuit of Happiness

The first step I took in my journey of creating my first 2D movie was to think about a theme to work on and weave a story around it. Once the story was completed, I created characters that I will  need for the narration of my story.

 2D movie requires background that goes with situation arising in the story and characters. So I created background pictures as my next step in movie making.

 After the characters and background pictures, I created props like mobile phone, food, car, bike that will be used by the characters.

                                   
  
After everything was ready, it was time for story-boarding which was collection of thumbnails of the screen shots of the movie, followed by key-frames. In animation we use Key Frames to define the beginning and ending scenes before transition takes places. To get an idea how the movie will turn out, I went ahead with the animatix. Animatix is the rough copy of the movie, with all shots arranged in order but it lacks smoothness and coloring.

I was satisfied with the output I got from the animatix, hence I went ahead with the creation of the movie. I brought smoothness into the animations, finished coloring the frames and added background music. Finally all that remained to be done was giving it finishing touches here and there. 

The efforts bore fruit when my movie was recognized by Arena Animation... 

Watch the movie Here

My First 2D Movie

As a part of my curriculum assignment I created this 2D movie -' In the pursuit of happiness' which won me second prize in Arena Day.

I am glad to realize very early in my career that hard work pays..Hope you all enjoy my movie and the simple lesson of life it carries.

Maa, I Shrunk Myself!

Remember the movie, ‘Honey I Shrunk the Kids’? With Photoshop, you can now become tiny and have fun on a toy bike. This is how you do it.

Choose a photograph of you riding or sitting on any bike similar to the picture below.

Find a toy bike you would like to ride on. Position it on a table or floor in the almost same position like the bike in the picture of you on the bike. Click picture.

 

Open both the picture files in Photoshop in 2 different layers. Reduce opacity of picture 1 and re-size and rearrange it to fit your body on the toy bike. 

Increase the opacity of picture 1. Select your body and delete the background.

 Now the image will look like this. 

Select the option image –adjustments--brightness and contrast. Play with the options until you are satisfied with the picture merging in the background.  You can even try your hand at the color balance.

Dim the highlights using burn tool so that they do not stand out in the picture.

 

If there are any odd looking contrasts in the picture, like the mirror in this picture, first erase the extra part with simple eraser. For the part extending on the body, select the part, press SHIFT +BACKSPACE. A new window will appear on the picture. Select content aware and click OK. Lo! Magically the mirror disappears without leaving a hole on the picture.  Works on CS5 or more advanced versions.

In the final picture, you will be tinier than your spectacles and riding a toy bike. This is how I shrunk myself. If you have any new ideas, like riding an ant or dinosaur try it out.

If you have suggestions for making this better and advice for me to improve on my skills, please leave a comment and let me know. Thanking you in advance.

Change in size and have fun!