For my learning project I have decided to challenge myself with learning how to create 3D animations. When I was in high school, I created a 2D animation of a children’s story book as a project for one of the classes I took. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of this project. That being said, it has been so long since then (I don’t even remember what program I used to create it) and with my focus being on 3D animation, I believe it is fair to say I am approaching this learning project with essentially zero prior experience.

My interest in animation first started when I was around fifteen years old. I was a fan of a web series Red vs. Blue which was created by recording characters in the video game Halo in order to create each scene. This method of production utilizes the video game engine in order to animate the characters and environment rather than doing it oneself, saving time and resources. In the later seasons of the show, the company creating it hired an animator named Monty Oum in order to animate scenes that went beyond the limitations of the video game engine.

I became a huge fan of Monty Oum’s work and was blown away by his ability to take these characters out of the video games I knew them from, and create scenes I would have never thought possible. Monty became a bit of a hero to me during this time and watching the content he animated gave me the desire to learn how to animate myself. Sadly however, in 2015, Monty passed away and the motivation I had to learn how to animate faded.

Now, over seven years later, this course has given me the opportunity to dust off this childhood dream of mine and commit to making an honest effort to learning this skill for at least two months. And while I do worry that I may have been too ambitious in my choice, I am beyond excited to finally try! After doing some research on potential animation software available for use, I have decided to use the program called Blender. This program is available for free and there are many learning resources available online including countless tutorials on YouTube.

In all honesty I have no idea where I can hope to be in terms of my learning by the end of this course, I might be lucky to simply get a basic walking animation done, though I am hoping to be able try more complicated projects. I am planning on spending my first week or two learning how to create 3D models within Blender. I feel this will be the best way to get comfortable working with the program before I move on to actual animation. I plan on starting by simply animating someone walking. After that, there really are infinite possibilities on how I could progress. Some ideas I had would be to animate a well-known scene from a movie or trying to animate viral dances found on social media.