Evaluation 20 sec animation

Evaluation

The aim of this whole module was to produce an elemental based animation that demonstrated the 12 principles of animation. The element where; water, wind, Earth and Fire, I decided to animate wind as my concept because I wanted to create a funny and over exaggerated character that was quietly in his living, until a strong force of wind blew open his window and changed the temperature of his living space causing him to take action, he is made to walk back on forth on the scenery because the wind is so strong it keeps pushing him back causing him to result to using a plank of wood to keep it shut. I chose to do wind because I felt it would a funny and original to communicate with a twist, I thought all the other elements were not as exciting and easy to experiment with using colours and effects. I think the force of wind is a lot more easier to experiment with because there are many ways to make the wind look fierce and over exaggerate its effects to do with its force of pushing and pulling. This was one of the reasons why I decided to use it as my element because I want to see if I could make a funny animation through the use of a wind, I felt that there were a lot of ways to make this animation hilarious to my audience, mostly through how my character moves and powers through the wind, whilst all the objects behind him stand still and firm, making him look as light as a feather as he is blown back.

My animation did not turn out how I wanted it to because I underestimated the time I had to produce my animation in, also I think I gave my self too much work to do because I wanted to out line my characters on each separate frame of the 240 but only ended up drawing all the frames to go back through them all outlining my characters figure. Doing this caused me to take up two weeks extra to produce the characters finished and outlined, my original estimation was two weeks but I had run over my original estimation at four weeks. These problems resulted me in taking longer than I needed, the file of my animation was also a problem because the animation is 252 frames long because I have miss counted the frames and extended them more than I needed to so my Mac computer would not allow me to turn it into a quick time movie file leaving no option but to keep my animation a Photoshop file. The main problems I face with the play of my animation is that it is too fast and slow in certain parts because I have skipped in between movements of the characters causing it to jitter and skip, the attention to detail needs a little more consideration, I think it would have been better if I look at something real in relative to my character, scenery and objects to get a accurate size and resembling for these factors of my animation e.g. I was told that the character should not be using a mallet to hammer a nail in a window and that the character would not use that he would use an ordinary hammer, but it was too late because I had already produced to many frames for the window and the whole layer had grouped as a part of the animated sequence so to change my mistakes I would have to had deleted a vital chunk of my animation to start again close to my deadline. The size of my character is not in proportion through out because he changes size slowly begins to shrink going back and forth across the scenery because I have the drawn the characters body bigger and smaller in certain frames.

In future I feel it would be better to enlarge my characters so that they are easier to see, this way it would be a lot more clear and easier for me to keep to proportion and size because I can keep to size using animation paper because of the papers transparency which will help me keep to guide lines. My objective would be to firstly get a calendar and mark down how many days I have to work on my project and when the hand in is so I do not underestimate the time I have. The main fault I will need to take careful consideration into in the future is not having enough of the right equipment to develop my story and make sure I don’t run out, because this hindered the progression of my animation and stopped me from finishing inking of my work in the day I was supposed to finish it and I would make sure I don’t go over the correct amount of frames. I will also remember to use the correct animation paper because using the A4 paper I used was not a good idea because it moved too often causing me to draw my character in all kinds of different positions. I was also told if I produce an animation with mistakes, out line the mistakes and list them so that the mistakes are known and correctable at the time I make them which would avoid me having to go back through a whole animation from the beginning this is something I may need to consider in the future to avoid producing another fault animation.    

Over all I have learnt that a lot of work needs to be put in to animation in order for it to function properly, you should never skip movements and run through every frame to ensure your movements are correct and proportion to scale is important because with out your animation does not stick to a certain size and could be seen as messy, inconsiderate and all over the place. Planning is also vital and keeps your work frame structured and doable with in the time because I will have an idea of when it should be completed e.g. Day/Month/Year. I hope all of these recognised faults will prevent me from making the same mistakes in the future.