Animation Evaluation

With my animation I had quite a few difficulties, but overall I am pretty pleased with my final result.

With the first song, ET, the difficulty wasnt the drawings, i found that easy, the hard part was the perfecting the timing. I took me a few lessons once we finished the animation to put it into iMovie, find out how off time it was, go back and fix it, then put it back into iMovie. Then check the next scene timing and repeat till i finished all the scenes.

What I also found hard were the transitions from each scene, because i really wanted them to link well together, so i really had to think about each one for a while. 

Lastly, the final animation turned out a lot different to our storyboard because a lot of the ideas we had just wouldn't work, so they had to be edited, and it was hard to think of ways to do each scene. For example the technique i used for the spinning globe took me a while to think of (using a world map in the back ground and the foreground was a sort of stencil, blacking out everything else but a circle) so these sorts of things were challenging.

The next song, Last Friday Night, involved a different set of problems and challenges as the style was very different to the other video.

At first we were going to have a photo background with Katy Perry drawn in, as this made it easier to change her body movements, however it turns out it is quite hard to draw Katy Perry haha. So we ended up using pictures and rotating, cutting, flipping and moving images to stimulate movement.

In the first scene we just flipped her and used different images to get different poses for her dancing, this was easy and didn't take long. However the next scene took me a while to come up with a technique to make her move, which was cutting off her arms or legs or whatever needed to move, and rotating them. This was both hard and easy, easy because rotating was simple, hard because when you do rotate them they don't always fit into the jointing body part perfecting. Also this effect may look unrealistic if done wrong or the picture doesn't suit it. This scene became quite useful and was used in most scenes.

I also had some difficulty with the actual images, because i was using photos of Katy Perry it meant the backgrounds needed to be photoshopped out, which with so many images of her, takes a long long time. 

Lastly, in the streaking in the park scene, I had some difficulty because it was quite hard to move her legs in the right direction to stimulate walking because i had to cut and move her legs. However this was aided with the package truck thingo on animationish, because it meant i also didn't have to move her, i just used the tool to mover her for me :) With the next scene however I didn't move each random girls legs as I didn't have the time, so I thought that no one would notice if I just had alot of girls, bunched up, and some moving, so made one cartwheel in and one tumble in to distract from the fact the others legs were still. 

The timing with this video was not that hard, i just had to fix one scene because i think we initially timed it wrong, but other then that they were fine.

With this video in general, i found the thing that helped me the most was the storyboard, i founded it made things easier to figure out when starting a new scene if i just referred back to the storyboard, it told me how long the scene was, what was in it, and the how it transitioned to the next scene.

I learnt alot of new animation techniques during the process, such as the cutting and rotating effect i used in the Last Friday Night video, and how to make a world spin and how to make girls in bikinis looks naked using black bars haha.

If i could redo this animation I would make a back up of everything, because of my losing Stephs USB : \ Also I would spend less time mucking around in class as it all eventually adds up and means less time to do the finishing touches.