Evaluation

This project is exciting, the preproduction stages were maybe not as organised as they could of been but when is creativity really that organised anyway, but I am very competent in me and hannah as a team. I’m very chuffed with our concept and I think even though perhaps sometimes I felt I didn’t recieve as much feedback as I perhaps wanted from my partner I understand that we have very different roles in this project and it became quite clear that Hannah wanted to be creative and come up with alot of deisgns and of course animate for the concept. But when it comes to the storyline and how the scenes and camera angles were going to work in order to reflect the clarity of our idea, it felt very much left down to me to figure out and come up with. Because of similar situations I became director and it works very well for us both as we both know where we stand and are getting what eachother wants out of the project. As there is only two of us, I’m aware work load can feel heavy at some points, and therefore I didn’t push for an animatic to be completed rather I figured if we had a detailed enough storyboard we could then both after submission sit down and work out the animatic together. This piece is something I am really looking forward to getting stuck into, not only am i excited to work with Hannah but I can’t wait to see what else we are able to bring to this project and what ideas may change and evolve for the better. My plan is after submission is to completely figure out what style we want to do and ways in which we want to go about rendering and colouring, although I will be doing the compositing and editing on after effects as we both agreed we liked the quality of the practice test i did. Overall, this is just the beginning of the project and hopefully I can make sure we both stay focused and on top of this animation so we both have a great end to the year.

07/01/2019 – 11/01/2019 Week 13

Research sources List:
No Sources.
Development
Over christmas me and Hannah stayed in communication and I made sure to keep her updated on the storyboards which she was more than happy with and had done some final designs and background designs also. This week I will be making the Design Document for the Group and my personal one ready for submission.
Strengths
I think this is the longest and most detailed storyboard I have ever done and I thoroughly enjoyed creating it, knowing that I wanted to make it good for Hannah and for myself was really motivational and I can’t wait for us to both start animating. I’m aware we weren’t able to do an animatic but I feel the storyboard itself is strong enough to reflect exactly what we want to do so I’m content.
Areas to Develop
As I said to Hannah after submission for this unit we may want to go back over the storyboard and tweak certain scenes, whether to make the action more dynamic or play with facial expressions. As well as we need to develop more backgrounds from the ones from the storyboard and create an animatic. My plan is the week after hand in to knuckle down and make sure me and Hannah stay on top of this big animation plan.

Evaluation

This project has been unlike anything I’ve done before during university or prior to university, in the sense that animations and animators who have always inspired me to want to do animation. Yet I’ve never really thought or considered how I could start animating my works to reflect those that have motivated me to want to be an animator in the first place. At the start of this project we were asked how the fable animation will challenge us skill wise and in what direction, and I new that I wanted to make background work and story telling a huge part of this piece. Like I had stated in my proposal, trying to teach yourself a new skill or way of changing how you approach something is always going to take time and you’re not going to get the desired outcome straight away. And i think was one of those things in life where I found myself getting completely drawn into developing and teaching myself how to use colour and create backgrounds with this realistic layered 3D feel, that perhaps my animation suffered a little bit. But I don’t think you have to have the most dynamic animation in order to tell an emotive and beautiful story, and although there are certain areas of this animation like scene two which I would rather redo and give it more movement instead of justt he hair moving, I don’t think the fable itself suffered because of these decisions. Animation for me, primarily is something I want to use to tell my own stories and something that I find more and more as I go on this degree and personal reflection is that you can tell your story through animation in any means you choose, and aslong as the audience can understand what it is you’re trying to show as well as conveying emotions then in my mind that would mean my piece was successful. My plans for this project, I’m really quite happy with the narrative and where I was trying to go with this piece visually as a whole, yes it doesn’t look exactly how I imagined it but it’s good base for me to keep on developing it, I think I’m going to really attempt to keep working on this and refining scenes and camera angles, so I can perhaps create a trailer like piece to have in my showcase. I think that would be a really beautiful way for me as an animator to keep developing my work. Or perhaps create mini scenes, and have a collage like showreel of scenes in this style and organic matter and characters which could all come under a certain topic or title.

07/01/2018 – 11/01/2018 Week 13

Research sources List:
No Sources.
Development
Over christmas I finished the entirety of the animating in regards to colouring and tuning any pieces I thought weren’t moving as well. I also composited all of the different layers that I had developed previously into layered backgrounds which I then added masks, lighting, blur and colour corrector in order to create my desired visual outcome. This is also includes smaller parts of animation such as the clouds moving and figuring out how and where to add lighting and shadow, again an area that I am not used to or have ever focused on before. Having finished my fable with the sound design re added due to the choice to pre compose seperate scenes and then adding them altogether, I then created my Design Document and Development Show Reel.
Strengths
I think my strengths this week have been mainly getting everything finished and rendered ready for hand in, regardless of areas that I would want to rework on I am happy with the overall finish and the skills that I have put into use this week especially on a software like After Effects which at first was very Alien to me.
Areas for Development
As I will state in my evaluation there are certain areas that I think needed more time and work on them in regards to movement, as well as my showreel maybe could have the timing a little more smooth than what it is. These are things I will take into consideration next term. Something else I would like to address is that I am aware that unlike the animatic the gasp in the final version is slightly out of time. This is incredibly annoying and I didn’t notice it the first few times, but I am now very aware of this and is something in the future as I will state in my evaluation that I would like to continue working on.