Finished Animation
Overall, I think my animation succeeded at visualising one segment of a story in coherence with the other segments. It is 17 seconds long, is in a 16:9 format and plays at 24 fps as a playable mp4 video. My designs considered what the team and I had discussed in class – I used a blue and red colour palette, used Josh’s designs for Jenkins and Eden and used blocks of the same shade when colouring my backgrounds to maintain Josh’s idea to draw inspiration from UPA (animation studio) that uses a simplified style. I think I made the correct choice to not use line work for the backgrounds, and I am pleased with the contrast between the background and characters. I think I made good use of the principals of animation and I challenged myself by including a brief walk cycle and mouthed words. If I was to create this animation again, I would make it less jittery – although this was a stylistic choice that drew inspiration from Vewn, I think that because this animation only lasts 17 seconds there is too much movement for the viewer to process. I only noticed after I had finished my animation that there are a few errors with the colour where I didn’t stay within the lines or missed a corner on the frame. To improve, next time I will triple check all of my frames to ensure these little yet noticeable mistakes don’t happen again. I would also make time to find or make sound effects to add to my animation as this would help the viewer understand what is happening.
This week, I finished drawing all of my backgrounds in Photoshop.
After using the oil paint brush tool to paint the third image, I added a new layer to draw the lights. I used a pale blue colour and again used the oil paint tool to draw two lights and blurred them slightly. Then I added another layer and scribbled white around the top left corner of the scene and used the “Field Blur” option to blur it out into a white haze. I think this draws attention to the left side of the scene so that the viewers eye is drawn there before Jenkins and Eden enter from the left. My favourite Filter option is “Camera Raw Filter” – I used it on every background to increase the vibrancy, exposure and vignette and to lower the highlights, texture and clarity. I did my best to create liminal spaces for my animation to take place in using these effects and tools, but if I was to create these backgrounds again, I would lower their saturation so the shade of blue is less vibrant as this might be less distracting to look at.
Once I fixed my animation for the last time and felt satisfied with the work I produced, I exported the video from Adobe Animate in an H.264 format into Adobe Media Encoder, which converted the video into an MP4 file that I downloaded and inserted to this blog.