Level 5 - 2D Computer Animation: All About Food! (2026)
- Jan 25
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 24
- Week 1 -
Concepts for Portrait & Interviewing
The module is separated into two halves:
Animated Showreel (Grade Value: 80%)
To help us understand how to better operate the two software and practice with different mediums, we were tasked with working independently or in a group with peers to create a mini-documentary centred around our feelings on food through a topic that interests us. We then think of questions to ask our classmates in an interview that we record and use the audio from to produce animation for. Our goal is produce at least fifteen to twenty seconds of animated footage for use in our animated showreel before the April 14th deadline. This showreel will also include animation work and concepts separate from the mini-documentary.
Report (Grade Value: 20%
We will also be writing a report essay on two software applications, two aesthetics within 2D animation, then compare them with each other on their negatives and positives alongside our evaluation on the outcome of our animated project and how everything coincides with it.
For our first week, I was tasked with creating a collage-styled self-portrait in Adobe Photoshop using only images of food, but before started, I had to seek out inspiration for a style that appealed to me. I took a look on Pinterest and found a lovely self-portrait created by İlkay Kocahaliloğulları, a talented freelance graphic designer in Amsterdam, Turkey. I really liked how chaotic yet tidy their portrait looked, particularly with the eye and large mouth.
Whilst scrolling through Pinterest, I came across Pablo Piccaso's work and that was enough to remind me of my love for his abstract pieces. So I searched online for his paintings and ended up connecting with one of his most popular pieces: Girl Before a Mirror. I really liked how each part of the girl and her "reflection" felt symbiotic yet disconnected from their bodies and the disconnected nature was something I wanted to apply to my artwork.
Once I got my inspirations, I also conceptualised which parts of my face could be replaced with food. To start, I organised a list of food I favoured and assigned them to different parts of my face.
Then, I searched online for images of the food I needed and gathered them in the Adobe Photoshop project, cutting and resizing them into parts of my face (Red cabbage as hair, almonds and hazelnuts as eyes, white and brown bloomer as my face, etc). I didn't want to make my facial features too exaggerated and I didn't want to over complicate them either. I wanted to make a simple and silly self-portrait before I moved onto remaking it in Adobe After Effects, THEN I'll begin to exaggerate the features.
When picking foods, I made conscious choices on which foods would suit my face best; I lve red cabbage and its twisty and curly like my hair, I love bloomer bread, so I used half brown bread and half white bread for my face as it also hints at my mixed ethnicity, I was also heavily inspired by Girl Before a Mirror evident by the split-coloured bread-face (Say that four times as fast.). I also thought my eyebrows being the crusts of the bread was clever. The almonds are my eyes whilst the pupils are hazelnuts because of their shapes and i love hazelnuts just a little bit more! The eggs are in place of rosy cheeks and the mouth is an orange slice. The nose is a slice of Brie cheese because I love the smell of Brie cheese.
This is a simple self-portrait, but looking at it now, I plan on keeping its simple design so I can more easily move it and exaggerate its mouth size and eyebrow movements more easily. With all of the work I had done on my ident in my Creative Industry Skills module, I am certain I'll be able to efficiently animate this silly face.
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Week 2
Animating in After Effects
For this lesson, it was time to finalise the designs of our food collage portraits and begin animating them using Adobe After Effects, but this time with a handdrawn element. I initially wanted to animate a string of spaghetti acting as the mouth so I could make the mouth movements as wacky as I wanted it to be, but for technical reasons I can't understand, it ended up being a lot harder for me to animate by hand using Adobe After Effects, so I opted to continue using the orange slice for the mouth and keyframing it to squash and stretch to make it as close to a functioning mouth as I could.
(add wip images here)
Before animating with the food head, I used my phone to record myself talking in-character as a way to time the movements of the mouth and head with my voice. This helped a lot when animating as it gave me clear direction for its character and how I needed to animate it. When voicing and designing my food portrait, I was took inspiration from the Fudge from The Amazing Digital Circus animated series for its hunger and voice as I felt I could relate to it on a disturbingly close level.
[Pictured: The Fudge from The Amazing Digital Circus.]
Whilst not yet finished, I aim to animate my portrait's face splitting open, revealing another three of my favourite foods: red meat, spaghetti and meatballs, all falling underneath the head and dangling like entrails. I'm going through a horror-phase right now and both the Krasue from Dead by Daylight and Predator character both inspired me enough to make these additions that I think, will make my animation unique from the rest.
[Pictured: The Krasue from Dead by Daylight.]
Sources:
tadc
the krasue
Week 3
Developing our Documentaries
For the third week of our module, I decided to refocus my goals for my documentary and further conceptualise the premise and themes present in my project. What was orginally an introspection about my. personal feelings and likes of "stale food" as a broad subject has now changed into a mockumentary about a leftover cookie who wants to know if he is still worth eating now that hes turned stale. Last week I had a very broad, foggy idea of what I wanted the documentary to be about, but now, I have a near complete vision of the animations outcome.
What helped me firmly establish the throughline of my documentary were fociusing on the audio excerpts of my interviews and narrowing the 8 answers I recoieved from my two interviewees, Fabio and Marley, down to two answers from both.
When conceptualising for different characters and story beats for my documentary, one idea that I thought of and immediately attatched myself to was an average, featureless cookie with a disembodied voice expressing their thoughts in a disinterested or content voice. Whilst i am avoicing an oppurtunity to do something creative with the design of the cookie itself, I aim to put the effort of character design and animation into the two interviewees present in the documentary, who will be based off of Fabio and Marley's voices respectively.
After comnceptualising, we were instructed on how to effevtively use tweening and easing in/out, so I revisited my food portrait with the intent of applying smoother motion as my keyframing was obvioud and made my food portrait move in a very stilted fashion. To circumvent this, I claned up my keyframe timeline by trimming most of the keyframes that could easily be replaced by editing the easing graph
Week 4
Week 5
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