Project 3: Artist Statement

My Daydream Video is about my leopard gecko Theon Ash Greyjoy. The video begins with Theon (in real life) noticing a yummy roach in front of him. We then transition into Theon's mind where we see what Theon thinks of himself: great and powerful like a dragon! Theon starts to chase after the roach and shows off his powers while doing so. He finally chases the roach up a mountain and at the top we go back into reality. Theon is standing on top of the "mountain" in his enclosure. He has has his eyes on the prize, lunges and.... oops he misses. No worries! He strikes again and crunches up the poor bug with his totally powerful jaws.

I drew inspiration from several things about Theon and leopard geckos. The first is, leopard geckos sometimes think fingers are food, even if the fingers are so much bigger than they are. This made me think, "what if leopard geckos simply think they are super powerful beasts that can even take on a giant worm the same size as them?". So became the dream of Theon being a powerful gecko dragon. I also drew inspiration from the fact that domesticated leopard geckos tend to have really bad aim when a bug is in front of them. What is ironic is that Theon actually doesn't miss very often. The final video of him catching the roach (and at first missing) was completely by chance as a first take! The last point of the video is that really its not difficult for leopard geckos to catch food. The yummy bugs are often just put in a bowl or at least in the contained terrarium where the geckos can easily grab them. I hope though that Theon thinks he's hunting cornering his prey like a wild leopard gecko - and like Theon the Powerful!

I learned a lot from this project and had a huge amount of fun animating my gecko. One of the most important things I've learned is that its good to have someone else look at your animations because its hard to perceive the speed of them while animating. I also learned that I was a bit overconfident in how much time I had vs. how tired I would be doing all the things I had to do. What made things difficult it that the past two weeks I had to carry several projects for others which made me so tired since I was doing way more work than I had time for. This brings me to my next learning point: things like that happen in college which is why it would have been wiser to pick a simpler thing to animate. Nevertheless, I am really proud of how my animations turned out. I've done some simple hand drawn animations (like in a flip book) in the past and I really wanted to take it a step further to complete a full animation sequence.

I used Adobe Audition for some sound, Adobe After Effects for a few animations, Adobe Fresco for other animations, and Adobe Premier to put it all together. Premier was used for transition effects as well as movement of the "camera".

And...

Nominated for not one but three Geckademy Awards!

The star of the film himself: