Animation 1A Formative reflection week 6

  

Animation 1A Formative Reflection

Throughout the weeks I didn’t actually spend much time planning and researching and this showed in the early weeks as I just went frame by frame and I would realise after playing back my animation the movement was a bit off as well as the frames and I would have to keep making refinements. I realised on the latest week that storyboards and thumb nails do make the process much easier. I also discovered that more time was spent outlining that actually making the animation and how much more time consuming it is to animate on paper compared to digitally.

 

Something I found quite challenging was doing research for the tasks. At first I didn’t really think I needed to do much research because things such as making a ball bounce seemed fairly easy in my head but I realised the research into how to make it look ‘cartooney’ for example from exaggerating squash and stretch was actually really useful.

 

For my research I mainly watched youtube videos such as AlanBeckerTutorials 12 Principles of animation. I found his videos really useful as explained how we should be doing the tasks like squashing and stretching as well as secondary action. I also found Bardot Brush’s video on animating in procreate very useful as I haven’t really done much animation in the software so it was beneficial to learn how to use it solely for an animation. As well as these, I used the Animator’s survival kit book to help me. I found that seeing every frame next to each other as a picture was actually really useful as it made me realise how mine should look.  For my references I mainly took pictures and videos on my phone which I could then rewatch and slow down to see each frame which helped.

 

My favourite part was definitely the creating because I really enjoy drawing and it was definitely the most fun part of the process.I found the research was definitely beneficial but not as fun and I did find myself skipping it one week and going straight into animating but I found that this was a mistake because I then had to stop half way through to watch tutorials to help me. Producing was also quite exciting though because it allowed me to see how the frames all come together on the screen and I would’ve enjoyed it more if I’d had the animation kit sooner because I did struggle to try and take all the images on my phone just holding it and found that often the frames didn’t really line up.

 

For this project I had really wanted to try animating on paper which I did for one week. I realised that it’s a lot harder compared to animating digitally and requires a lot more time especially for photographing every single frame whereas, when you do it digitally it’s usually automatically put together depending on the software you use. I’m glad that I experimented with animating on paper because now I know that if I do it again I should manage my time more wisely because I found myself rushing to finish it in time for class and this definitely lowered the quality of work I could’ve produced if I’d given myself more time.

 

If I was to do the tasks again I would definitely plan my time better as I did find myself rushing to finish some the day before which would have definitely impacted the quality of the animations I made. I would also split my time better between my electives as I feel like my time spent between subjects wasn’t very fair. As well as this, I would revisit some of the animations and add more frames as in some the movement doesn’t really look right.