Michael's Art 328 Process

This 3rd animation uses a recognizable image of an orchid in a pot along with the content limitation of only using a plant:
train_referential

It took me quite a while to figure out what kind of recognizable image I was going to use. At first I was thinking of a worm but then I thought about how hard it would be to make it meander in a curvilinear fashion. The very next thing I thought of was a flower growing and breaking which lead me to the very nice potted orchid.

This animation almost built itself. As soon as I clipped the flower and pot from the background in Photoshop and assembled the layers on the stage I instantly saw how the flower would interact with the sound. It became a very fluid mechanical process that was a lot easier than the previous animation (Thank God!).

I went through the sound clip a few times to decipher all the sounds and I noted at one point it sounds like a second car squeak comes in. I also noted the steam venting happens twice and trails off each time. So I started with animating the first plant growing out of its pot in sync with the train squeak. I instantly tested movie and got a laugh out of the train squeak noise now relating to flower growth.

From there I continued to match up the different types of car squeaks. I listened carefully for the sound to see if it sounded like a quick directional break or a simple up and down motion. As you will see I applied the quick 2-part squeak to the flower breaking and the 1-part squeak to either the bottom half moving up/down or the top part re-aligning itself. I began to see the sound define the structure of my animation and within an hour I had the animation complete. But not without adding the background changes for the steam venting sounds.

I found all 3 animations I did to be quite successful under the limitations chosen.