I made a animated trailer for the children’s book “Monsters Don’t Eat Broccoli”. This was my first time working with after effect and an animation other than stop motion. Although there is obviously a lot of room for me to gain skill and improve my technique, I am very proud of this. I based my animation style off the animation used in the “Dumb Ways to Die” Campaign. I liked that animation because it was smooth and bouncy and I thought it would be a fun take on the story I chose. I also chose this style because I knew it would be a challenge for me.

Although it took me a large chunk of time to animate this, I really grew to appreciate how much movement it takes to make a figure move around in a natural looking way. Originally I wanted this trailer to be 5 seconds long, but while animating and getting close to the 5 second point, I felt like it was moving a bit too fast and that it took away from what I was trying to portray. I also had wanted to have the monster walking through the trailer but after discussing with some peers I chose a different path with having objects come to the monster.

This project brought up many challenges of its own, I was nervous about animating the mouth and the crushing and consumption of the tractor, but after doing some research and some playing around I’m happy with the outcome. For the sound for this animation I chose to have a bubbly childish themed song playing throughout with some sound effects on top. I had more recognizable grunts and human-ish sounds but decided to take them out to try not to humanize my monster as much.

The final touch up I added to this animation was actually re-sizing everything so that there was a larger background and a more centered action shot. I really struggled with this decision because it left more surrounding space. I watched the animations that had given me this idea again and there is always a lot of surrounding space from the main action, so I stuck by my decision and I am glad I did.

Overall I found my work to be effective and appealing, I also found this design to be memorable which would make it an effect trailer for the book “Monsters Don’t Eat Broccoli”.