This entire semester has been incredibly enjoyable for me – I have come from knowing the bare minimum about animation, with absolutely no experience in creating an animation, to having made what is essentially a forty second animation that I am immensely proud of.
The aspects of my animation process that I believed worked well were my application of scenery and setting, colour theory, character design, and secondary action; I can’t believe how much my grasp on secondary movement has improved especially. Prior to this, my main concern about my earlier animation attempts was that things felt very stiff and unbelievable, however with my progress in secondary movement I feel I’ve improved so much in this area.
Previously, I had also never put too much effort into backgrounds, sets and scenery: this is an aspect of animation that I had no idea that I enjoyed. Initially I was mostly interested in character design, however after my experience in this module I would also be interested in working more within background art.
Colour Theory had been something that I was apprehensive about. However, after my lecture in colour theory – with additional advice from lecturers throughout the module – I have gained so much confidence in using colour and find I quite enjoy it now.
Despite all of the positive results of working through this module, there are still many things that I would like to improve upon. I feel that my staging throughout the project was quite weak – it was heavily front facing, and there weren’t a huge amount of dynamic camera angles; if I were to go back to the beginning of this process I would try to implement more interesting camera angles.
I also felt that I was very poor in timing, there were a lot of points during this process that I knew my animation was too fast paced, either through my own observations or through the advice of my lecturers and peers. This improved a lot as I was progressing, however they were difficult adjustments, and I struggled a lot with this principle.
A final improvement I would like to make would be using another animation programme. Because of hardware and my own comfort, I used a combination of Rough Animator and Procreate – I am very comfortable with drawing in procreate and did not stray from that comfort zone to utilise better animation programmes; Procreate is not great for animating due to it’s limited maximum layer count, it does not feel very intuitive and is not industry standard.
Working within a team has been a positive experience for me, with five of us returning to our original concept after moving around week-to-week. I believe my contribution to our team animation has been good: I created the opening scene to our animation as well as my own segment.
To conclude, I am very aware of the many improvements I will need to make in future projects. Staging, timing, slow in and slow out are all things that I either was not comfortable with or didn’t afford a lot of consideration. Despite this, I worked incredibly hard on my segment and with my peers to try and create the best animation I could – and with my limited experience and knowledge, I believe I really did achieve this.