evaluation

For my final major project I was set the task of choosing 3 themes from a list of 6 and develop them into a story, I then worked with one of my tutors as a client and decided what theme to develop into a animation for the end of year show.

My three ideas were evolution, destruction and time, for evolution I planned to make 1 animation using 4 short animations made in different mediums to different definitions of evolution, for destruction I planned to have an already destroyed man made environment that would slowly show how nature can destroy to grow, and my final idea was time where I planned to show a series of events in a short time using a ‘reverse’ time-lapse.

Originally I wanted to go with my evolution theme, however to various constraints I changed to my time theme, with this change of theme I will only produce one animation using one medium so it will be simpler and easer to produce, compared to 4 short animations using all sorts of materials and different software.

For my evolution theme I was inspired to show off what I have learnt while on this course, so I wanted to Produce a few short animation with different techniques that I’ve learnt over the past few years. For my time theme I was inspired by dog rehabilitation videos that show a dog recovering from being reduced from the streets and I wanted to make an emotional story related to this.

During production my animation changed from my evolution theme to my time theme due to various complications, firstly the tools in Adobe Flash refused to work, after checking the layers and settings I asked a tutor for help, after a while he was unable to help me for fix Flash, shortly after this Flash quit unexpectedly and this repeated a few times, furthermore I also had problems in Maya when I was going to re-design and develop my stop motion character in 3D, however when using the polygon primitives I was unable to edit any of the faces/edges/vertexes, after these problems I had a client meeting where I discussed these problems and the current status of my project and came to the conclusion of switching themes.

For this project I started making notes on my three chosen themes, evolution, destruction and time.

Next I started to develop these notes into characters and environments, however due to time restrictions i could only develop my evolution theme.

 

After talking with my client to change my theme I started on producing my assets for my time animation, these consisted of environments and character positions, to do this I started producing a rough design with a low opacity brush which I used to develop the outline, after  added a fill followed by details, and for environments I also added textures, finally I removed the rough design. Some environments were designed with multiple parts which could be moved or hidden in the scene, for example the rose in the graveyard and a door that opens (which is not included in the final animation).

For my evolution theme I was originally going to produce 4 short animations with different techniques, such as building a basic zoetrope, producing a claymation, 2D in Adobe Flash/PhotoShop and a 3D animation in Maya. However since changing my theme to time, due to time constraints and required software not working, I will now produce a 2D animation using Photoshop and AfterEffects/PremierPro, for this I will plan and make my environments, characters and other assets in PhotoShop and import them into AfterEffects/PremierPro before rendering the animation with Encoder.

From this project I have learnt; to plan with creativity but choose what I am capable of producing (such as planning with my evolution theme but choosing my time theme because it is more realistic with the given time limit and workload), when designing/developing a character I can draw individual parts repeatedly instead of drawing the entire character very time (such as what I did for my 2D evolution character, I started off with drawing the entire character, with the body and eyes and tail and ears, for a few times then moved onto individual parts, such as the Jackalope horns/antlers), and finally planning on how I produce my animation (when my tutor/client suggested starting with what I would find most difficult then working towards the easier parts to produce). These will help me in the future because I now know more about preproduction and planning/time management.

My client helped inspire me for my project by recommending things that are related to my theme that could help me, such as the Futurama episode where Fry finds the fossil of his old dog and the 1960’s movie The Time Machine. My client also helped me with giving feedback on my current work, such as what they like and what I can improve or change, also my client helped by recommending how I should produce my animation with what to animate first. These helped by providing another point of view on how use the time theme efficiently and how i could improve what I had done.

For my final animation I liked how I showed a sequence of events in reverse to create a story, and how I used little detail on the people, mainly their faces, to keep the dog as the main focus for the animation, furthermore I liked how I used the fade transition to show different moments in time that have been distorted because they are memories. However one aspect I did not like about my final animation is the anatomy of the characters, I feel like some body parts are the wrong proportions and the anatomy can even change or at times be incorrect, for example in some scenes the back of the dogs front leg is curved and during other scenes it can be very angular.

Overall for my final animation I believe it to be a success because I believe that I made a story that the audience can connect with, which is enhanced by the background music because it conveys a greater amount of emotion than just the animation alone.