With my group animation finally complete, it is now the best time for me to reflect on the journey as a whole to get to the point I and my group are at now. After spending some time in group 1 having a large part in creating a unique fictional world it was certainly a surprise to be thrusted into the group I ended my journey with so suddenly, however I felt quite attached to the whole concept of the world submerged in water with all of the living inhabitants being fish who have evolved to be a reflection of what humanity is today, as it brought me back to some of the animated shows I watched as a kid, such as SpongeBob SquarePants.
Immediately we leaned into a mafia story with our world as we thought of it to be original to have such creatures in this position, however it was also a sort of tribute to the group who came before us to make the initial foundations of this world as some of the main points in their ideation were that there was a mafia with sharks and there were also crabs who were rivals to these sharks.
When creating the art style we mostly wanted to play into our own art styles to show the range of each of our members, but we also used one animated show to have all of our styles somewhat resemble to still keep it somewhat consistent, which was the Cartoon Network show: “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends” as this show used very unique designs and silhouettes to create non-human characters.
To begin the production pipeline, we had to create storyboards for each of our designated scenes; my scene takes place after Adam and Ben’s with the main character “Joe Schmo” reflecting on the brutal interrogation the night before which he witnessed while having lunch with his friends in the mafia. Joe also begins to secretly plot on overtaking the mafia by killing the boss of the organization and taking the throne for himself. After completing the storyboard I created a video animatic of my scene to test the timings to ensure the quality of the final product.
Through this project I got a great handle of the 2D animation production pipeline, along with getting to make use of a lot of animation techniques to make the final output look high in visual quality, such as composition, form & shape, the 12 principles of animations (mainly including squash and stretch, timing and motion, anticipation, staging, etc.). To create this animation I used a software I was not used to, Krita. I quickly got used to how this software operates, and thanks to tutorials, I managed to create my animation the correct way, making full use of the tools provided to me. I particularly enjoyed using the Bezier tool to help me clean up the art and to help me effectively colour each of the frames in the line clean up stage of development. overall, it was a difficult process at first, however once I got a handle of the software I was able to create a final output which I personally believe exceeds the expectations of the brief.