Reason for not using animated text

Originally I intended to use animate text with in our group animation but I decided to disregard this idea. The reason for disregarding this Idea was because I felt that it didn't work with this animation because I feel that the animation it self would not suit any style of font, I think that there would be too many different style involved if I was to add moving text with in each scene, I just could not picture the right font for this animation and the deadline, I also would have the hassle of having to sync each word to what is being said with in each scene which would take sometime, plus the deadline was too close for me to be working on these features. I would say that this has effected the animation because we now have long sentences in a standard font which look very week in communication the importance of what is being said because they can hardly be scene and the colouring for the text is very flat.

If I was to do this again I would say that the font would be hand drawn because I think that my style of animation would make it flow better based on my style being line drawing and I would have preferred if the text would slide in because what we have now doesn't move, it does not look very good because it does not do the animation any justice just being still. 

Evaluation

Over the course of this project we focused on creating a documentary which depicted a sense of documentation of a truthful event, which was where we decided to talk about the death of a family member relating to one of my partners. Personally over all I think this project went partly well, but has been disappointing in how it was planned out.

This was positive in the sense that we managed to sort out our scenes and was able to create a finished animation. The main problem which dampened the project the bad organisation and miscommunication with in our group we didn't inform each often of our progress and Molly one of my partners failed to attend set meeting revolved around the issue of our progress we never saw her as often as we should have which meant our group was not organised well enough. A lot of work by Molly was handed to both me and James, they did not feature any of these scenes created by me which slowed the progress of our work because the animated scenes were not shared well between everyone with in the group. Both me and my partner James ended up working on our own bits individually before combining both my scenery and his characters. Generally, Communication slowed down our progress because we did not have enough communication between us all even though we use social media we did not stay in touch regularly. Me and James waited a very long time for Molly to finish her scene very close to the deadline.

For this project we got a lot of inspiration for our animation from books and other documented animations which were shown to us by our tutors and helped in spire our animated ideas even further by giving us an understanding into what communicates well with a target audience e.g. colours, style. I also looked at one of my very own favourite artists called R.Kikuo Johnson reason being that his art was very simplistic and effective in its representation of human characters in making them look appealing both colours and style this was to help with both characters and environment.

Over all I would say that the project went well generally but the was negatively effected by the lack of communication with I myself, Molly and James, if I was to do this project again, I would say that I would have decided on picking partners who I knew that I would get on with well and people I would be able to trust with their side of the project. One of the things I would focus on is the social media side of communicating, even though we formed a group on Facebook the communication on that was not regular so I would say that better organisation of social media would be need to help improve our experience of working with each other because we lacking in communication skill based on this area.

The main thing I can take away from this brief is that I have worked as part of a team experienced what is like to bring multiple styles to create one animated piece. I have also improved my animating skills even more because I learned to use more new tools like the Puppet Tool in After-effects which I never knew existed in. I have developed an understanding of what styles work well with one another and how to make an animation appeal to a specific audience through visuals. Things I would say that I would need to learn from this overall experience is to have better communication with my partners mainly because we spent too much time apart and did not talk about our work much, another problem was our drawing styles which were said to not work well with one other, we managed to get them working with one another but majority of this was spent sorting out making sure our drawings styles worked well for the final outcome of our work.

I was very sceptical about working in a collaborative group for this brief, my idea was to work on my own animation and I was not too keen on who I would be paired. I slowly started to warm to the idea the more the project went on and would now say that is a great experience because it has developed both my communication and has made me in to a better animator because I have now developed not just the skill to animate but the ability to share ideas and work alongside others. Personally I didn't feel comfortable with the story based on family deaths, I think it could have been based on something else reason being that I would say this is a common thing people talk about when giving a family documentary and the idea that we were aiming this animation at young children seemed a bit depressing for a child. I didn't think that representing this idea in a childlike style would take any child’s mind of the idea of death as an issue, I would say it was too much of a sad issue to pitch to children as a document.

Things I would personally critique on the final animation is the colour of the text and how it was presented, it is very basic in its appearance and the way the character’s work well but could interact better with the background, I would say that I would have made the characters e.g. prints when they walked or just made them look like they work involved with the scenery maybe through the style which they were presented and the colours could have been a bit darker. I think, there are not enough movements in characters, they seem very rigid in how they move on screen.

I am planning to work with the puppet pin tool a lot more in the future, personally I think I need to practice more with After-effects so I am able to use it a lot more fluently because during this project I was still learning new skills whilst still working which slowed down the progress I was making with my animated work, so I plan to prefect this for my future project through watching tutorials using After-effects over the summer to help build my animated work skills.      

                

        

Experimenting

during this project I personally think there was not enough experimenting done by me, I would say that I didn't do as much as I should have because I was impatient and just wanted to get on with the practical work I my self can't stand it went process and production takes too long. I am now learning to plan my work properly and take time to experiment before going into production, this is something I should have been doing during this project because it could have resulted in us coming up with a better idea that which could have been better than the one idea we now have. The design work is was said by tutors to be well executed but at times I had problems with animating my drawing style because it didn't move very well, I personally wanted to experiment with traditional animation and this to the animation it self but this became complicated because of my style being different to the intended style for the group animation which both Molly and James intended on.

 
I was using Flying Lotus's animated music video for my original idea because I wanted all the features of my animation to flow and communicated the narration through its change and movement, sadly my group had a different idea.

If I was to do this again I would use tradition animation like this because I think that an animation like this is clean in how it moves and and the colour used works very well, I would have rather had each scene of our animation pop in one after the other.

I personally don't like how the style for our animation has turned out because I prefer if it was clean and sharp in its appearance not blurry and too child like because I personally like my animated characters to have form, these characters are too smudged and simplistic.  

Outcome of final animation

Today we finally finished our animation, I feel that our organisation was left too late and at the last minute we decided to finish our animation, we have had many complications during the making of this project and I feel that out of a group of three, only two of us were doing most of the work. The reason for me saying so is because Molly our extra partner was not around for a lot of our group meetings and did not keep in contact as regular a she should have and another problem was the fact that we created a social media group for us all and didn't use it as much as we intended to. This effected our final animation because sections of the final animation were split between us each and we didn't communicate enough to find out how each of us were progressing during the production or even met up to see if the work that was being done was good enough, this alone resulted in scenes being created in correctly.

Overly the out come of this project has been well executed because we have accomplished what we have set out to do in making the animation look child like and appeal to little children which is a positive, but my negative would be that we should have chosen a story which was not too depressing for children because I don't think children would really want to hear about death as a tragedy.

My improvements for the final animation would be to change the story to something more suitable for children something soft and probably funny in its narrative, I personally think the footage is a bit blurry and the designs of the characters aren't too good because they look too simple in their appearance e.g. I would make the hands look more like hands rather than smudges or blurs.

(The video is too big to fit on this page so it will just be submitted separately in a folder)