Final Evaluation

Year 9 Creative Media Animation Project – Term 03 2011

Mr Andrews

Post Production reflection/evaluation:

Respond to each of the following dot points (using complete sentences or paragraphs). You should include as much detail as possible in your responses.

· Discuss whether your final animation clearly reflects your original concept and planning and describe any elements you had to modify when creating the project;

I believe that my final animation does clearly reflect my original concept, for the reasons that the storyline I originally wrote is (predominately) replicated throughout my final movie the scenes are pretty much identical to those that I designed in my planning, and the animation, for the most part, follows the storyboards that I drew. However, while saying that, there where number of small alterations and changes that I made through out the process as my animation skills developed and I gained new inspiration, or as time ran out and I had to move more effectively and more efficiently in order to finish. Some of these previously mentioned changes include completely changing the first establishing frames of the move from shots of the sea and the coast with the camera honing in on the town to a simple shot of the camera zooming in on the box that was my set. This alteration was necessary for two reasons; firstly, that creating my initial mental image would have been quite complicated and time-consuming. Secondly, that when I attempted to align the camera in a way that included my whole set, the complication arose that the edges of the box were visible, and so by purposely allowing the audience to see that it was a box in which a figure came to life I remedied this problem. I also slightly altered a number of scenes in which my planned camera positioning was not suitable. In addition to this, I slightly reworked the second half of my animation by adding in an establishing shot of my second set rather than have my character regain consciousness immediately. Another major change that I made to my animation was omitting the second last scene of my animation, the newspaper scene, because I ran out of time after I had finished editing my scenes and so couldn’t finish it, my to my regret.

· Explain how your animation skills developed during the project (i.e did you become more efficient?; did the quality of your animation improve?; did you have to use a variety of techniques? etc);

My animation skills improved greatly throughout the unit, and this is evident throughout my final movie, as initially the movements of both the camera and the characters are quite jerky and uncoordinated and boring, simple, particularly any walking cycles as I found it very hard to work out which positions I needed to put my character into. However as I progressed these skills developed and I began to add more life to my characters, through how I created their body language and such, as demonstrated where I managed to make my character not just walk but sneak as well as pant from the exertion of running. I also adopted a wider variety of camera positions to relay to the audience subtle messages of power in each character, by angling the camera down of the little boy and up on the dark figures for example.

· Describe any problems or difficulties you encountered during the animation process. These may include; technical difficulties, corrupt or missing files, difficulty using the editing software etc;

This term has been far from easy, and I have encountered a number of problems, however I am lucking enough that none of them have been major and I have managed so far to avoid losing extensive amounts of work. I did have one USB go corrupt, however I was lucky enough that it was early in the unit and so I only lost two short animations that I created in class, which I would have had copies of if they had uploaded to blogger, and also my character profile. In addition to this, I encountered a problem with the camera that I borrowed out for the weekends before and after camp, as I constantly flicked in and out of focus and changed lighting as I attempted to film with it. One major problem that I did encounter was my time-management skills, as I ended up being very stressed in that last few lesson left as I didn’t have time to finish everything. As a result of this my animation is not as good as it could have been if I had used my time more wisely and worked more effectively in the first weeks. One thing that could have present a major problem for me was the fact that I lost my USB on the last day, however I fortunately had everything backed up on my computer which I had brought to school that day.

· Explain whether you made effective use of storyboards and planning to streamline the animation process;

I do believe that I did in fact make effective use of my storyboards and planning as I not only drew up quite detailed storyboards that depicted each shot, line, action and camera movement as well as sound, but I also wrote out the plot and designed my two sets as well as a character profile. I know that I did do enough planning because I was constantly aware of everything that needed to be done and what I needed to do next – I never had to stop filming and think, “Right, done that. What do I do now?” This is demonstrated by the fact that I was aware I needed to film my final scene before I changed my set to create the ‘Alternate Wold’ because it needed to be filmed in the original setting.

· Describe any time-management issues you had during the project and describe the steps you used to improve in this area;

As I previously mentioned, I encountered a number of time-management related problems in this unit, as I began to run out of time in the last few weeks as I was sick for a bit and we had camp, not to mention that I had missed a week of class earlier in the term to go to Griffith. Because of this, and the fact that I admittedly did not work as effectively in the early weeks of our assignment, even though I did make my characters and set at home, I had not enough class time to finish my animation. In order to rectify this problem, I organized to borrow out laptops from the library and even managed to get the required software on my mac at home. However even this did not prove to be enough as in the last fews days I still had to make my soundrack and edit approximately 300 or more frames, so in order to finish, I cut out the newspaper scene as I didn’t have time for Mr Andrews to Show me how to make it. Because of this, I did manage to finish, however a much better solution would have to use some foresight and relies how much work this animation would actually involve so that I would get right into it in the very beginning.

· Discuss whether you undertook adequate and detailed reflection to throughout your project. Have you provided enough evidence to support your work? (Look back at your blogs/journals and think about whether it looks like a whole term worth of work);

I do believe that my reflections are suitable and sufficiently detailed, however I do believe that I should have done more and added more detail to them because there is some work missing, such as the two animations I lost on my USB. In addition to this, I believe that it would have been better if I had done daily reflections, rather than weekly ones, as I tend to forget what I have don in the beginning of the week.

· List any other software skills, techniques, tricks or shortcuts you have learned during the project.

During the project, I have learnt a number of new skills and techniques, as well as developed various previously existing ones. One skill that I am particularly proud of is my new found ability to edit frames with speed, because not only did I learn how to import and export frames from iStopmotion, but also can not edit between 30 and 40 frames in ten minutes. As well as this, I learnt various little techniques such as moving the camera and the character in my scene with the ice cream, rather than every individual ice cream scoop in order to create the illusion that he is falling.

Discuss your feelings about the production task:

· Are you satisfied with the final result?

Yes, I am reasonably satisfied with the final result, because it is finished and it looks good, and have grown really fond of my main character, as he is quite cute in the animation and there are some sections that look absolutely fantastic. I am also extremely proud of the fact that I managed to edit it and how good the edited scenes turned out, as I did not expect them to look as good as they did considering the amount of time I had to do them.

· Did the animation process require more/less time than you had thought?

The animation process required significantly more time than I had originally thought as I was not initially aware of how long actually filming the scenes took, in fact, I almost gave up at the start because I was that slow. I also greatly underestimated the actual length of my film and the amount of animating it required, so all in all I was utterly unprepared for the amount of work this unit involved.

· Would like to change any aspects of your final project (style, soundtrack etc)?

There are a number of things I would like to change in my film – I would really like to re-animate a number of scenes that ended up jerky because of my faulty camera, as well as the scene at had a show from my hand. I would have also like to spend a bit more time editing the frames so that I could have maybe added extra effects to my film, and also spend a bit more time on the soundtrack and putting the final product together, as it ended up being very rushed.

· If you could start the project again what would you do differently?

If I could start this project again, I would choose a simpler concept for my film, because that way I could focus more of the quality of the film and developing and bringing life to my characters through body language and such. I would also start filming as soon as possible in order to give myself maximum time to finish the film and to ensure that everything is not rushed at the end.