Project 3: Final Animations/ Evaluation.

Here, are my two final and finished scenes from my animation. 

The aim of this project was to showcase my skills in a digital format, showing how well I could manage, produce, and eventually display my work in the from of an animation. 

I began this project a little unsure of what I wanted to produce from it, I knew I wanted something rather cute and different, but I wanted it to stick in people's minds, and this is why I added such a bizarre ending. I started off with the intention of creating everything in Cinema 4D, but soon after discovering After Effects I think I knew which one I preferred. I really enjoyed making assets and in particularly, the little walk cycles and loops of my characters, as I really saw them come to life and it gave them a lot more personality, which is what I wanted to show in my animation. 

I did encounter a few problems whilst animating my work, and one of those was finding my way round Cinema 4D: Although I have a basic knowledge of the program, and enjoy using it, I found it extremely difficult and problematic to speed up my workflow and get my way around the system without constantly needing to ask for help. 

I think if I were to do anything differently, I would have done all of my animation scenes on After Effects, as I feel I got on much better on that program and would have got slightly more work done. But I have really enjoyed this project and would like to finish off this animation later on in the year. 

Project 3: Week 8 - Finalising my Animations.

Finalising my Animations.

 This week both at home and at college I was finishing up with my third scene from my animation. Now that I knew what to expect from After Effects, I was quite confident in producing more work in a shorter space of time, and focused on getting the loops of animation as smooth as possible. 

Before that though, I started off by creating PNG files of pieces of scenery in my third scene, that was so that I could take those pieces and just put them straight away into my animation scene and not worry about having to cover pieces up or cutting out any white space. I did this with pathways, stones, trees and grass, and it saved a lot of time when putting all of my pieces together. 

I then focused on making my little fawn character, who meets an awful end towards the end of the animation. I made a small loop of her blinking and eating grass. And then made a 3 frame animation of her getting scared and jumping up to see what's behind her. I took time making this piece of animation because I wanted to emphasise just how timid she is and how reluctant she will be to go on this quest with the raccoon.
I'll also admit I surprised myself with how well she came out, I love how cute she is and how very Bambi-like she seems, which is what I was aiming for.

This is the final product of my work from this week. I got the scene just to how I wanted it and I think it looks cute as hell. I liked the way the colour scheme came out and how everything blends together well. I didn't want this scene to be too bright, put rather pastel and delicate looking, which I think is apparent here. 

Unfortunately, when it came to rendering, one of the files was missing from the animation folder, as I must have saved it onto the computer instead of my hard drive, and this animation didn't get fully rendered, I did, however, hand in everything I'd done for it. 

Project 3: Week 7 - Filming my Animations.

 Filming my Animations. 

After having a bit of trouble with time when trying to film my animation with cinema 4D, I ended up giving After effects a go to see if it would fair any better. And truth be told I wish I had used this in the first place!

I found that using After Effects was just as complicated if you haven't used it before, but once I got the basic grasp of using the layers and merging folders together I absolutely loved using it. I found that my artwork could be seen more clearly and could be fully appreciated without me having to put in artificial lighting in the backgrounds.



I also found that using After Effects was a lot like Photoshop, as I should have sooner since their made by the same company. But using the camera tool was completely different and I think suited me much better, as all I needed to do was alter the image and record that movement as a keyframe on the timeline, instead of having to actually whop out a camera tool. 
I could also go back and edit mistakes easily, take out any random points I had made, or adjust any assets more easily in a 2 dimensional space and a 3 dimensional one. 
This is the set up of my second scene. I found that the colour scheme can be appreciated more in this set up and all of the colours, as well as the assets works really well this way.

Advertising Research;

The Evolution of Beauty - Dove

This advert caught my eye immediately because it uses a unique feature found in very few advertisements. It uses time lapse, making the video go exceedingly fast but still manages to be coherent, not being too fast for anyone to make sense of it. The animation has been made using live action footage that has been sped up, the image that the company chooses is then put onto Photoshop and edited. This is when the film becomes a speed paint, almost like a tutorial piece which will then engage the audience to see how the model changes and how. Although I don’t agree with the processes in this advert, I think the process itself is very, very effective! This has also inspired me to try making an animation using the time-lapse tool so that I can do a lot more within the time space of 10 seconds.




Go Compare Silent Film.


This advert, as annoying as it can be to other people, is one of my all time favourites. It consists of a comedy/drama style short through the means of a silent film, and I feel as though this has been applied because of the number of people who complain about the advert and the singer himself. The music was specially created in order to portray the well known jingle that is one of the most defining points of the advertisements, along with subtitles underneath for people to read. 
This highly influenced my ideas (changed them entirely,) and made me want to produce a silent film with a Charlie Chaplin styled advert. This with the aspect of time-lapsing, would work really well to accompany the E4 logo. The effects of the silent film would be easy to apply once I had shot the film as well, along with ornate frames and jumpy gaps in the film.