For the brief Character and Narrative, I am
satisfied with the work overall whilst noticeable change can be made for future
reference which I’m going to talk about on several aspects in the evaluation,
and what I would amend during the making if I can go back.
Firstly on the hand of the generation of
the ideas, I started with a random mind storm on paper scribbling out ideas and
characters that came into my mind, although several of the ideas were
generated, I abandon two of them that I went into the stage of sketching
storyboards, but I spend relatively short amount of time to made my mind to
focuses on one of the ideas, the Adrift. In the future I would use a better
approach of mapping out ideas rather than doing random sketches as I did this
time and usually in the past, which can increase the speed of choosing the
direction. During the design of the character, what I would amend was that I
stick with one of the design and did not attempt to interpret it into a better
version or adding any elements to it. The advantages would be that the actual
making of the animation can be started quicker, while it may not be the best
decision for the character. However, I am satisfied with the chosen one, as it
is simple to animate in Photoshop in a higher speed, whilst containing enough
details for the audience to tell that the character and the younger version are
the same person, which in this case, is her fore hair and the color of her
dress. The animatic was made from the storyboard straightly, but showed less
movement and what the actual animation would look like, which allows me to
adjust the duration of each scene of the animation, and to decide whether I am
going to delete or add any extra scenes into the animation by simply replacing
the animatic with the short scenes, but on the other hand it gives less
information for the purpose of communication with a simple animatic. Therefore
I would try to make the animatic that would present in the most similar way of
how the final outcome would look like.
Speaking of the making process of the
animation, the method I decided to use of collaborating the traditional water
color painting with digital animation gives a pleased result and the quality of
what I expect at the first place. One of the aspects I would say unsuccessful
is that the style of the digital animation has a huge difference which made the
character in the animation seems odd from the water-colored background although
I wanted to create the effect that the character is standing out of the
picture. What I did to solve this was adjusting the color and the quality of
the brushes in Photoshop trying to make it look less strange when I group them
together into one animation. What could be amend before animating would be to
list out more methods, or just using one material such as do the whole
animation in water color and make it a stop-motion rather than using After
Effect to rig the painted pieces. The whales which are animated with the puppet
tools, the movements are too smooth which hugely decrease the hand-made feeling
of the water colored whale, but it turned out to be the best way after a few
attempts of other methods. During the first crit session I discovered that gif
files has a huge disadvantage of not playing correctly but with the white
background, which has wasted me a short amount of time to render, it was solved
with rendering out image sequences out of Photoshop rather than other formats,
that allows it to be edited secondly with a transparent background even after
it is rendered out.
It is also the first animation that I tried
to include my own record of sound along with the background music. It does not
contain any dialogue, which made it easier using just sounds to represent the
characters’ feeling. I edited the sounds in Adobe Audio, which I think is a
quite functional tool that contains the edits I needed, such as changing the
pitch and the speed of the sounds. The other sound effect were found on
websites, which I think I will try to produce all of them myself in the future,
also as a practice of analyzing what could the resource of the sound be different kinds of sounds. As it has not got
any dialogue, lip syncing is also unnecessary, which is one of the techniques I
really wanted to have a go, therefore I would try to animate characters that
speaks later on.
On the other hand, I struggle sometimes
with effective researching, and writing about the research process. In the
future I would research in a wider range of media such as books and journals as
well, instead of sticking on the internet. I think I did not chose the research
titles precisely on the need of the animation but more on a personal aspect,
therefore in future researches, I would be more focused on the project itself
in order to increase its quality whilst the making of this animation in a more
effective way.
As for the study tasks, DUIK in After
Effect was took the most of the time comparing to the other ones. As I
struggled with rigging the character correctly, which made it hard to be
animated. To solve this I looked at several video and text guides, which all
helped me to develop a better knowledge of DUIK and would be much more familiar
with it if I am going to use it again in the future animations.
For conclusion, I am pleased with this
animation for Character and Narrative of collaborating two animating methods
together to create certain effect, while a huge amount of amend could be made
to increase the quality of the animation when looking back, however there is always
a first attempt.
