Evaluation

My main aim for this project was to create an animation that depicted some of the scenes the time of the Empire Windrush. I have accomplish my goal of illustrating scenes from the Windrush book, Originally I planned to create an animation that was a slide show of images, which I later on decided to make into a motion comic. Everything works well, but the only problem has been the time frame exceeding the amount needed by 20 seconds or more, the scenes were supposed to be at least five seconds each but some were extended by a second or more mainly for motion used with the animation. The focus was to make sure each scene played continuously without any cutting or freezing, the sources used to help me with my idea has been Youtube, mainly for its content of tutorials and title sequences I visited e.g. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang which feature similar elements which I intended  to use for my animation.

The whole object of making my subtitle has not just been to recreate scenes from the book I have chosen but to place individual details elements into my piece such as music relating to the time and period of the Windrush, considering the era and dress sense, Getting the factual information right, because the book itself retells the history of the boat and the journey of real people aboard a ship. The animation need to have a solid link to the events that took place, especially the journey, what type of people were aboard the boat and why. A subtitle  is not a narrative but they draw links to films so I looked at some of  Saul Bass's work e.g. Anatomy of a murder which draws a link to the movies content through the use of a paper cut out of a dead body as a marked symbolism of murder. My focus was to communicate a different set message based on the content in my book through a set of captions and moving illustrations drawing links between the book and maybe what the documentary would contain.

The main problems faced when making this have been using After Effects the walk cycling of my character, this mainly because I had not had a full understanding of this package at the beginning of the project so there for struggled to find various settings and functions.This alone was not just the problem, I realised when coming to the idea of making my character walk it was going to be a struggle because I am not good with walk cycling and need some practice so I used images of a walk cycle to help me the on the problem is when I wanted to scale my character, the characters features would dissemble into individual parts. I think the main problem with the walk cycle is anticipating my characters movements and what stages of movement go where from beginning to end.

Feedback given along the development of my project has been very constructive and positive. I have been criticised on the links for the scenes to make sure that they have a strong relation to the book its self and what it is about. Along the way I have been asked about my use of content and as to why I have decided to use certain features with in my animated movie. people have said  that the animation works very well though there is the odd feature that could be improved on, like the scene with the use of a few characters playing domino's, someone stated that the scene works well as an animation at this stage of animating anatomy and this should have been applied to the rest of the animation because the style starts to become really simplistic and changes in different scenes. The captions were said to be really confusing mainly for two different type of texts showing up in the same scene and reading differently, I was told that people were not were not clear on which of each text was the titles or the captions.    

If I was to animate these scenes again I would not change their content but would  make sure that I pin point each time frame properly and work to time measurements and try to feature more moveable humanoid character that walk across each scene. Though I was able to reduce the seconds down to 30, still think I need pay attention on this for the future and make sure that I start off with a fewer frames and keep playing back the time frame and replacing scenes if I have to.