My name is Tatsuya King. From the age of five I have been drawing. Whether it was pouring the monsters and fantasy battles from my mind onto a blank page, or filling my notebook with sketches of bugs and plants from my backyard, art has always been my eyes and voice. My first animations were with my father when I was seven, and we used LEGO and a camera to make stop-motion shorts over which we narrated sound effects and voices. In eighth grade I rediscovered stop-motion when I cut out little drawings of ghosts puking rainbows and used stop motion to make them come to life. Later I found an app that would allow me to animate digitally, using an apple pencil to create longer and more complicated shorts. At this point, I exclusively created stick figure battles, which I soon got bored of, leading me to forget about animation for a few years. In senior year, I dove into animation once more, but this time with a new eye for narrative. My latest animation experiments have explored themes and tones very personal to me, while also pushing me to expand my visual vocabulary. My art has always been an outlet for my creativity, and in recent years I have learned to process my thoughts and emotions through it as well. This project is my chance to synthesize all my experiences up to this point into one culminating piece. I hope to look back at this project in ten years and see a window into who I was at this time as an artist and a human.

To complete my project I must do several things. First, I will have to learn how to navigate and use a Wacom tablet in conjunction with Adobe products because that is the technology used by professionals in the industry. Second, I will need to finalize a storyline and plot for my film. Once I have done all of that, I can create the animation. Creating the animation itself is no easy task, and involves storyboarding, many levels of drafting, revisions, and production. Although I have completed animations before, those were done on more basic, amateur level systems, and if I hope to take this skill further I will need to learn how to animate like the professionals. For the first two weeks of the project, I will divide my time between practicing with the Wacom system and finalizing my narrative. These two weeks will involve the most teacher interactions, as I hope to meet with Anna Gonzales (Personal Essay teacher, and advisor to my short story honors project) to better understand how to construct an effective narrative, as well as several of the art department teachers to discuss my use of visual and auditory language to convey meaning. In the third week, I hope to move on to storyboarding and transferring my sketches and ideas into tangible work. Weeks four and five will likely involve the bulk of the animation, and I will need to devote almost all of my time into getting the work done. The final week will be my opportunity to add production, audio, and any other finishing touches to my piece. I will not be continuing any of my x-blocks, but I will take a 3D art and drama senior seminar. For service, I will be working with Samuel Beacher every week for park cleanups.