“Potion of Love” was my final animation project. I actually got inspiration from a playing card which depicted a person making potions with a heart-shaped hole on them.
The story I wrote based on it followed a witch who wanted to brew a love potion to fix the hole in their heart. But after finding out that this quick method wouldn’t work, they collapse in despair. It’s only after that they receive comfort from their cat, that the hole in their heart shrinks just a little.
Since this was much longer and ambitious project, I didn’t have a lot of time for animating. I started by making a an animatic, which helped me plan out the timing of my animation.
I spent the whole semester using a provided Wacom tablet, which was very cool to use, but I struggled a lot with the sensitivity of the tablet and the hand-eye coordination between my laptop screen and the tablet. I’m not used to not being able to see what I’m drawing right under my hand. While working on this project, I remembered that I’ve used my Ipad before to connect to my mac laptop as a drawing tablet for Photoshop. So I tried that out and surprisingly it works really well! I think it made me feel more comfortable due to its familiarity (I only do digital art on my Ipad through Procreate).
Even though I was so excited to tell the story I came up with in the animation, I quickly realized through the animatic that it was very long, at least for my current skill level. I really underestimated how much I needed to animate, as I assumed based on my plans that I would be using a lot of repeating animations. So when I realized how long animating this was actually going to take, I was already too invested in the project and I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of any of the scenes I planned out. I think it came out pretty close to how I imagined it to be for the first half of the animation, but for future endeavors, I plan to give myself much more time to work, so that when I always inevitably underestimate the workload, as least I won’t be rushed. I also would like to spend more time doing research and practice of subjects I want to animate, such as clothing and the cat.