Applied Animation// Evaluation

For this project I was given three briefs to choice from; the first involved animating two indents intended for television channels, the second focused on animating a title sequence of a book that hadn't already been adapted into some sort of film and the last was to animate a sort advertisement for a charity. I choice the brief of Title Sequence because I found the idea of animating something based from literature very existing.

I struggled at the start of the project, because I ended up developing not one but two books into a few days of production and later dropping them. The first 'Hairy Maclary' I found was already animated back in the 70's for the BBC and the second 'Swans In Space' I found incredibly dull and lifeless after a few weeks of concept work. Luckily I stumbled across a graphic novel in my local comic book store that I was instantly inspired by after flicking over the first few pages. 'In Real Life' is a comic that focuses on a teenage girl who isolates herself playing an online multiplier game and feels that she experiences more out of life online then in the real world.  I was driven by the stories heavy political undertone within the comic to work over time in the concept stage in order to not fall behind on world; I really wanted to animate a title sequence for such an awesome story concept. 

I wanted this animation to be a little more different compared to my previous animation projects, regarding the visuals. A lot of my animations are very 2D with heavy outlines; I wanted to avoid doing this and being inspired by our regent Maya inductions I wanted to attempt animating without a solid outline, which is something I had never done before. Originally I was also wanting to animate this on paper with watercolors, but quickly scrapped that idea after remembering how short this project was going to be and how long it would take to animate like that. So I began animating on a computer, animating entity on a computer was also something else I had barely experimented with and was happy to experiment with again. Looking back at the project I wished I had incorporated more medias into the project... such as watercolour. 

 I found the hardest part of the entire project was animating the first segment with the main character, where the camera moves around her. I used no reference besides trial and error so it was really hard to get right, despite it only being a second of footage I really worked my socks off on getting the movement as realistic as possible. I'm most proud of this part of my animation, partly because of the effort and experimentation I put into it and the fact after so many failed attempts I managed to get the animation to look right. I'm happy with choosing to rely heavily on a computer for this project; because now I feel I am more comfortable with Photoshop and after effects (especially using layers in both softwares)

I really enjoyed working on this project, despite getting so frustrated at times at relying so heavily on a computer. There are still a few animations errors within my finished piece that I want to revisit but over all I am incredibly proud of what I've managed to animate in this project.