For my honors project, I made a 7 minute animation! (View it here!)
I've done a few of these in the past, and they're all written, animated, and voiced entirely by me.
For this one, I decided to make it about the Galapagos Islands. The reasoning behind this is because of a documentary on Charles Darwin I watched in a class last year. There was a part where it talked about how Charles Darwin thought the marine iguanas were disgusting and ugly creatures, and I suppose just the thought of this guy getting so angry at these little reptiles was super funny to me and I wanted to do a joke around it. So, yeah, I made a whole video for one joke in a way.
I started by writing the script. This was actually the first time I've sat down and written out a script before making my videos; Usually I have a basic idea of the direction I want to go with the video and improvise some dialogue before animating. I decided scripting it out first would just make things easier for me, so I'll probably be doing that more in general now.
The next step was to draw out all the frames. This part by far took the longest; I started drawing in late March and finished around not even a week before the deadline. Granted, I took some long hiatuses, but it was still a very long and tiring process. Sometimes I'd have to dedicate entire days to drawing the frames. By the time I was finished, I had over 370 different drawings for the video. Because I don't have an actual animation program (they're usually expensive), I drew every individual frame of the video and put them all together in Windows Movie Maker.
Movie Maker is a free program, and thus, it isn't very good. At least, not for this sort of thing. For instance, I could only have two audio tracks at a single time (voice narration and music) so, if, for instance, I needed a character to be talking with background noise behind them as well as music, I'd have to edit it without any music, save that project as a music-less video, and then open that video in a new Movie Maker project to put the music in. The point is, it's tedious and I would absolutely not recommend using Movie Maker to create several minute long animations.
Despite the tedious and time-consuming trials that come with making videos like these, I have to say I'm glad that I chose to make an animation. This sort of thing really is my biggest passion. Through animation, I can freely express myself by drawing, doing weird voices, writing funny dialogue, and hopefully, entertaining those who watch my videos. I have to say that it's definitely my favorite school project of the year, and I'm hoping that, in the future, I can find more opportunities to make animations for projects!