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Place Reflection

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I finally finished my film at 5:30 in the morning, after working on it for about 16 hours straight. Overall, I am proud of the end result but I’m not too pleased with the ending. It’s rushed and sloppy, and I think it brings the rest of the film down. All the hard work I put into really thinking out shot types and how to efficiently and economically tell my story feels like it has been undone by a naff ending thought of at 3AM.  It’s just sloppy – in every meaning of the word. It got to stupid O’clock in the morning and I had to think of a way to wrap up the film in a quick, simple and easily animated way. It was the I could come up with the time I had in my sleep deprived state.

Ending aside, I am very pleased with how my film turned out. My attempt at sound design was successful and I think that it really works well in conveying the story to my audiences. Inspired by the sound design workshop that I took part in a few weeks back, I decided to really go all out on this aspect for this project. After all, my teacher said that sound makes up for 50% of what the viewer experiences when they’re watching a film. That’s a whole lot for me to ignore and not properly understand. I knew that I was working on a tight schedule, and due to the labor intensive method of traditional animation that I was experimenting with for this project, I wanted to make my life as easy as possible by not having as much on-screen to draw. Only the essentials. Other details, such as setting, atmosphere and object importance could be conveyed to audience far more easily and succinctly through sound rather than visually. For the first time I think people have understood my film without me having to explain anything to them, so in that aspect my first attempt at sound design was a definite success. I also think that I managed to be very economic with my use of shots – I did actually end up cutting out a few scenes that I animated because I felt that the story could be told in a better and more efficient way. This is something that I first tried to do in my Ritual project, but I don’t think it worked as well. I’ve learnt a lot since then, and gotten a good deal better since then, in my opinion.

The one thing I would improve on in this is the narrative. By the time it came to animating I didn’t have a proper ending thought out – I was just winging it and hoping that an idea would come to me soon. Unfortunately, that didn’t really happen. I need to make sure for next time that my idea is fully developed before I begin production to avoid this mistake happening again. 

Fishman Manfish Walk Cycle

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After the sabotage of the original Fishman Manfish, I could not bear the pain of animating my dearest creation ever again. That all changed however, when I realised how it would make a nice addition to my showreel. So Fishman Manfish is reborn anew!

Yay.

Interview reflection 2

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Over the christmas holidays I decided to take matters into my own hands and animate my own version of our Kane FM interview using Flash, as I had originally intended. I wasn’t all too satisfied having only a model and a set to show for the equivalent of two week’s worth of work, so I went all out and tried my hardest to make (what I believe to be) my most polished and completed animation.

I started out by selecting a voice clip that I thought would be both interesting and manageable  in terms of animation. Then, I went along through-out the duration of my selected clip and drew each of the main key frames for the actions that I wanted my character to move through. I also drew the character’s face and split each separate feature – The eyebrows, left eye, right eye, etc – into individual layers so that they could move around independently and I would have full control over them. With the key poses all planned out, I then began to animate the in-betweens. As I started doing this I realised just how long it would take me to do, so I started planning ways that would cut down on the number of frames I would have to draw without compromising the quality of the animation.

I came up with the idea of cutting away from the character talking as a solution to this. Cutting away to a visual representation of what Haydn was currently talking about not only saved my frame count, but it also kept what was happening on-screen interesting for the audience (I hope). I think that this is one of the reasons why this project was a success.

After animating the three cut-away scenes, I then finished drawing all of the inbetweens. Once I was happy with these, I then went back into each frame and added colour, as well as a bold line around the edge of the character. I’m not entirely sure why I decided to add the bold line – it’s something I do in my drawings in my journal and I really like the style, so I just fancied trying it out and seeing how it worked in an animation. I think it worked really well!

With the body fully animated, all that was left to do was animate the head. I must at admit that by this point in the project however, I was really burnt out and wasn’t 100% focused anymore, as I needed to start planning my current project, ‘Place’. Because of this, there isn’t all too much facial animation actually taking place. I had originally planned to have the head moving around as he was talking, along with the eyes moving and looking around, but I just couldn’t devote much more time to the project. This is the one area where I would say that my film isn’t very strong. The head remains stationary through-out the majority of the animation and the eyes are set to blink roughly once every 4-5 seconds. I did spend some time animating the eyebrows however, as I found them a simple way to add visual emphasis to what my character was saying.

Overall, I’m really happy with the end result. It’s probably the most amount of time I’ve spent on an animation and I think this really shows through.