The Animation studio module has advanced my knowledge of artistic fundamentals. The module challenged my technical abilities, accelerating my artistic growth.
I had alot of fun with the character design assignment. I already felt comfortable in this area of production however the careful consideration of silhouette and visual metaphors have expanded my design thought process. The silhouette and shape language of a character is the clearest way to communicate personality to a viewer, costuming, colour and expression add to this. Colour theory week exposed a huge gap in my knowledge. I understood colour symbolism and schemes such as analogous and contrasting etc but found it challenging to put it into practice.
I struggled to keep up with deadlines, one reason for this was starting projects digitally. Whenever I get creatively stuck in my process I draw in my sketchbook because the artistic process is accelerated without the luxury of instantly deleting and editing lines in photoshop. I took extended periods exploring ideas and ideating. This can be positive but I eventually needed to limit my ideation phase to a set amount of sketches in the early stages before choosing one to develop to meet deadlines. The animation assignment emphasized the importance of organisation and clear communication in creative teams. All work completed was sent to the group’s discord channel however despite us all sending in early versions of storyboards when our animatics were edited together it revealed a continuity issue. My animatic ended with the lead character at the bottom of the staircase and in the next scene, she is at the top. The stairs are where most of the action takes place so it made sense that my animatic was the one that needed to be changed. This could have been avoided if we had made a quick edit of our first ruff passes and put them under more scrutiny in creative discussions. My animation test of shot two was extremely stiff and scratchy looking. I animated shot four with the guidance of The Animators survival by Richard Williams. Williams discusses always making clean drawings because clean lines are different from sketch lines and therefore behave differently. I drew clean frames for all my shots in photoshop and transferred them to adobe animate moving forward. Timing movements took the most time to plan but still each of my shots moves faster than I intended. For future animations, I will create tests using the characters simplest forms and the behaviour of secondary actions before making my clean frames to save time.
I now routinely save PSD files and final JPEGs to One Drive after my USB pen became corrupted and I spent hours restoring files when I could have been animating.
Despite working from home for some time, I continued to engage with online classes and group animation discord. I worked to the best of my abilities on every assignment. During this module I discovered a love for storyboarding, lecturers advised sketching compositions from movies to develop this skill and I’m excited to do so. I will improve upon my weaknesses by including backgrounds and colour into personal illustrations and practising animation timing. Meeting deadlines is crucial to industry work. I can set timers to increase my focus and productivity.