"Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud:

This book was a very fun read, and I am happy it got assigned. One thing that truly stuck with me is when the author talks about how the reason that we can see ourselves in a sketch as simple as two dots and a line is because when we are going about our everyday lives, we can't actually see our own faces and can only tell that it's moving from the muscles we feel moving, which in our face are our eyes and mouth only. That blew my mind. Then he blew it even further by drawing himself realistically and stating that if he was drawn like that throughout the whole book instead of the simplified, cartoony version, we wouldn't listen to him as much because we would no longer see ourselves in him. I would love to read more about that specific phenomenon in the future.

Animation Storyboard: Figures of the Altar (not the real name):

For me, Maya, and Pedro's project we decided to expand upon one of Maya's current projects for Physical Computation. She had created an interactive altar and wanted to add possibly AR animation that plays whenever someone holds their phone to the top of the altar, which has a crystal. Although I forget how we as a group landed on creating different characters interacting with the top of the altar/crystal, as a team we talked about what we wanted each character to represent, which would dictate how the characters looked and moved. We decided on Grief, Joy, and Desire. While it is up to interpretation, I personally associate these emotions with an altar because we grieve those who are gone, we have the desire to see them again and for closure, and we feel joy in celebrating the lives of those who have passed.

We split up the work by each choosing a different character to design and draw a storyboard for, as all three will have overlapping action with one another. I chose joy, and decided that I wanted my character to be jumping around on the crystals since the movements I often associate with joy is dancing, running, and jumping. While I still want to add more details to me character, I think that I am happy with the shape of it and the different shapes that it takes as it moves.

I can foresee some difficulties with turning this character into an asset, but I don't think that I have enough experience with After Effects yet to really tell how much of a headache this will cause me. I look forward to learning more in tomorrow's class and will continue to iterate on my character.