T. K. Arispe

 Here's my midterm project from one of my animation classes. I believe the assignment was to animate a character entering the frame, interacting with a box and then jumping away. It absolutely did not have to be in color or include backgrounds. #overachiever #everyclassneedsaHermione

I animated this in Flash*, but converted it to a GIF for easy viewing. Once again featuring Toko and a generically gritty cyberpunk environment.

*This isn't to say I employed Flash**-style animation and used tools like tweening, rigging, and shape drawing. I did that stuff in my Flash class. Everything here is hand-drawn frame-by-frame. I just executed this in Flash because that was the animation software I had on my computer at the time, and it had some helpful features that made frame-by-frame animation much easier, like onion skinning and the ability to easily manipulate objects on the frame (which I used for the motion of the box at the end, because who wants to hand-draw twenty frames of a rectangle wobbling back and forth).

**Yes, I said Flash. I'm old.

I'll be totally honest, at the risk of sounding self-important, I disliked days when the teacher showed everyone's completed assignments to the whole class for commentary and critique, because I felt really self-conscious about turning out pretty polished stuff like this when some of my classmates could barely draw. I wasn't out to make anyone feel inferior--I was just determined to do my absolute best and earn that A. I tried hard to be charitable in my assessments of their work and find something nice to say about each of them. I often felt like there was some tension between my classmates and I when they made noises like they felt I was purposely trying to upstage them, which I wasn't. 

I guess the takeaway from this is that college is a lose-lose situation socially.