On a recent rainy afternoon, we had some special guests visit The Wave: Sean Wells and Crystal Villamayor, two super talented folks from the other side of the Bay. Sean, who heads up the Swells Studio, is a filmmaker, animator, colorist and generally creative guy; Crystal is equally as creative a spirit who can be found working on a variety of aspects within the Swells Studio projects, including creating and animating hand drawn graphics, editing videos, overseeing production design, and just about every other task that falls through the studio cracks.
We asked the pair to come through and drop some knowledge on us about creating moving images and how they’ve managed to pursue their creative passions as a career. Long story short, we learned a lot. But we may have learned the most in the process of creating our very own Sunset Media Wave “bumper” animation, a project which Sean and Crystal guided us through the entire way.
Different Wavers were tasked with cutting out waves and a sun from construction paper (they also cut out some clouds too, but they didn’t quite make the cut), which we then took pictures on using our phones and then placed into the animation. Another crew of Wavers hit the media lab, where they worked with Crystal to animate the hand drawn text in the animation. In addition, Find Your Voice‘s Hannah made a quick five-second piece of music to score the short animation. The result (which features Wave instructor Glenn’s face on a dolphin for some reason), can be watched below—and keep an eye out for it at tagged on to the end of our future videos!
In the end, it was a fun, fast-paced day where we learned a whole lot. A BIG THANKS to Sean and Crystal for sharing their talents and helping us make something cool!
