Alex Palacio Essential Animation Portfolio

Full animation collection is archived in the links on the left menu.

Animation and storytelling have been used throughout history to educate and entertain. My process involves using an animation program and illustrating the characters and their environment. My interest in animation stems back to my younger years when I was obsessed with cartoons that dealt with good vs. evil, and when I used to use my toys to play an imaginary television channel where I would pretend that the toys were the characters of my very own cartoon show.  Later in life, when I got too old to play with toys, this fascinating program called Adobe Flash, gave me the chance to experiment with animation and allowed me to make animations based on the cartoons of my imaginary television channel.  I was always interested in the multiple steps it took to design the characters, their environments, and bring them to life. 

My animation involves digital animation. Adobe Flash is a digital animation program, which uses vectors in order to animate. The great thing about Adobe flash is that it allows anyone to experiment with animation. The term flash animation is used to refer to a visual style where there is a sort of simplistic and unpolished quality. The history of flash animation began in the 1990s, when the bandwidth for many Internet users was usually at 56 kbit/s. A solution to this was limited animation that was meant for the web. This gave the opportunity for artists to show animated works under 1 MB, which could stream very well in the Internet.  The vector-based drawings of flash cartoons result in a clean graphic appearance. Flash animations tend to have very limited animation, but some flash animations also can incorporate traditional animation in there too. With the great number of animated flash tv series, flash animated TV commercials, and some online shorts, flash animation has actually had its own renaissance. 

Within Adobe Flash, there are certain techniques that I used in order to make the animation. Within flash, I drew a turnaround for each character then I converted each of the drawn characters into symbols, which are used for storing objects and characters that can be animated within the main animation timeline using a special method called tweening. , Then I split the body parts into different layers so that I can move each body part with the motion tweening method, which makes the animation process more quicker. This process is known as cut out animation, or in this case, limited animation.  Because I was the only person making the animation, I needed to rely on the use of motion tweening, in order to speed up the animation process and at the same time make a longer story. In animation studios, teams of people have to work together to get an animation done on time. I took advantage of Flash’s various tools in order to speed up the animation process. Some of the animation sequences had to involve the use of traditional animation techniques, which in this case I had to draw the characters movement changing on each key frame. I used the principle of anticipation in order to make the animation have more movement.  

I always had a fascination with art, and loved drawing ever since I was a kid. I’ve become more interested in drawing because people have seen me draw pictures, and have enjoyed them. I’ve been interested in animation ever since my junior year in high school. I started experimenting with animation programs during that time, and I created some simple animations. My older brother Johan encouraged me to pursue animation as a career goal, since he liked the animations I did. I heard that a career in animation involves good pay, and that in its own would allow me to be able to make a great living out of my skills. Since then, I’ve been trying to improve my animation skills more and more. I may not be a perfect animator, but I have done some good animations. My animation will show the progress that I have made in my skills in animation since back then. 

- ALEX PALACIO