SYFY

SYFY was a stop-motion project for my first animation class at Ringling. The assignment was to create a funny gag between advertisements, and the logo had to be on screen and resolved for 5 seconds. This project has been running at Ringling for at least 10 years and I still had the urge to create something that has never been done before. I was hungry in class, and it's been a while since I ate fresh carrots, so I wanted my animation to have something to do with carrots. I pitched this idea to my professor, along with a few others, and he loved the carrot idea but asked me to make the SYFY letters the “carrots.” I fell in love with this idea and started sketching possibilities in Procreate.

After my storyboards passed, I started making an animatic in After Effects. My timing on some things was not great, and I was having trouble coming up with a resolved ending with the SYFY logo at the end.

After a few tweaks, I finally started animating in Dragonframe, a stop-motion software. I did all my character animations in Dragonframe and exported them as JPEG Sequences.

I then imported these animations into After Effects and added props such as the watering can and the leaves on the letters. The biggest challenge was syncing my After Effects animations with the stop-motion ones, but after a few hours of experimenting, it worked! I finished this project satisfied with how it turned out.