Lion and Mouse evaluation
For this project I have created an
animation based on a theme that I have chose for myself out of a selection of
themes presented to me. The theme that I selected was over coming the monster.
To assist me in the development of the concept and ideas for my animation I
looked at stories previously created relating to the theme of over coming the
monster. I selected my favorite story relating to the theme, the story was one
of Aesop’s fable the lion and the mouse.
For the outcome of this project I created a
fully animated digital animation composed of developed scenes and a visual
story driven animation.
For this project I combatted a
lot of my known weaknesses in order to improve my workflow and time management.
I had found that in previous projects I had easily lost track of my work by
having my files unorganized and not having them easily accessible. This
negatively influenced my time management because something that would take me
half the time to do instead took me double that amount and I had to rush much
of my work.
Taking this all into consideration during
the development of this project I specifically went out of my way to create an
organized folder structure with a separate appropriately named folder for every
file. I found that this helped a great deal and shortened the time it took me
to do my work. So by doing this I have took the opportunity to ease my workflow
and stopped the threat of becoming unorganized.
I
feel that reflecting back on my previous projects has been very important in
taking a proactive approach to this project and made this project far easier on
my time then it would have been had I not made so much effort in the
organization of my work.
i feel that this has been aided by the use of S.W.O.T analysis. by using this self evaluation system i have been able to quickly revise past issues and succesfully combat them.
To finish the development of my assets
after scanning them in I imported them into an image editor program, adobe
Photoshop, and proceeded to draw over my sketches to create clean colored up
line drawings of my backgrounds and characters. I used a variant of different
style that u had leaned over the duration of the past few years of being in
animation and used the opportunity to show how much variant I can have in
styles of drawing. To edit the drawings
I used a basic variant of Photoshop’s tools to aid the creation process. Tools
such as the brush tool and layer to keep my line work separate. Also using the
separate function of layer blending to create overlay and multiply layers in my
artwork to help my shading and lighting to create to right atmosphere for the
scenes in my animation.
As a part of experimentation with my work I
tried creating some of my larger structure based assets in 3d, however although
they worked well as an object themselves they clashed with the rest of the
visuals and looked too out of place. I have documented the creation of the
objects but they are not featured in my final animation.
To show and display a range of skills I
used several types of animation. For the staring scene I used a pose to pose
style of animation . to do this I created four separate images of my mouse
character each showing a progression of step movement for each leg. Normally I
would have created a lot more frame between 8-12, however for this animation I
am emulating the style of a motion comic. This means that the movements are a
lot more clunky and spaced to give the feel that you are reading the frames of
a comic book. To create to actual movement of the character across the scene I
loped the four poses and positioned the character and key framed it each time.
I think that I was
very successful in this module with my work. By being able to look back on my
previous module and sitting down to assess what my issues had been in those
projects consecutively I was able to pin point out my most prevalent weaknesses
that were hindering my work each time and stopping me from doing as well as I
wanted to and having unnecessary difficulties in the management of my work. My
most prominent weakness was that by being so unorganized I often got into a panicked
state that I wouldn’t be able to complete the work required, which in turn was
even more of a negative impact on my work because by being panicked I was
wasting even more time.
By removing the root issue of being
unorganized I did not get into a panicked state so I did not waste time. By
doing this I found I had a much easier to manage workload because I didn’t have
work to do that I had forgotten about or lost.
Benefits that came from this is that I had
more time to sit and learn the use of a, unused by me, program. This has
further extended on my range of skills and the utilities I need to know how to
use to make me more successful in animation.
Reflecting back onto
the completed animation for this project there are some aspects that if I could
go back and alter I would. Originally my animation was to be a silent animation
to make the meaning of the story the main focus and more prominent however
looking back on the animation and watching it several times I think that
although not strictly needed it would benefit from some audio. Background noise would give a sense of
location and add to the character of the settings that the animation is placed
in. I feel that this would enhance the visuals for anyone viewing the
animation. Although there is this drawback to the animation I feel that it is
very successful in what I wanted it to do, which is to be a modern retelling of
the tale of the lion an the mouse. The finished product has a beginning, which
sets the story, a climax of a fight in the middle of the story and a resolution
and conclusion to the story, all, which successfully interlink with one another
and transition from one scene to the next without loosing the viewer anywhere.
