Animated documentary - Evaluation

Evaluation

I really enjoyed this project because I finally got the opportunity to create a lengthy stop motion film, in the past I had created little bits but never had to plan for it as much as this, so I got to put my knowledge of sculpting and animating in stop motion to proper practice.

I really enjoyed the process and between us, me and Ciara used our skills to produce an animation we are proud of. We have learnt a lot during this module such as: setting up equipment in a way that wouldn’t be a healthy and safety risk when working in dark environments and easy to manoeuvre round, using the correct materials to create our models to be able to animating them efficiently and next time consider the scale so they are easier to work with and animating in general. For future I would also look at adding eye sockets into the character design, so avoid the eyeball moving around the head, with the newt the eyes had a place to sit and were easier to move I thought.  I feel we progressed in animating by the time we got to the end because of all this knowledge we had learnt. We got better at animating as we went along and found that using our gut feeling for action and when there should be a blink, really worked. Because sometimes if we planned for some movement, we did not make it last as long as it should or it was not as smooth, so I think sometimes gut feeling and going with the flow of it worked for us. I think we also work great as a team, we do have our differences in opinions, but we have different skills to the other, so can help where the other can't.

We had a few problems with equipment, sometimes we would come back the next day/week and equipment had been knocked, or removed, which set up back setting up again, we did have a few camera knock ourselves, but after setting up better, a camera knock from us rarely happened, but was easily fixed. In future we could maybe look at borrowing a heavier tripod, and discuss borrowing a camera for the whole length of our animation time, because other people needing to borrow it caused us positioning problems, hence the jumps in the animation, and did make us frustrated that we had to do this numerous times. We understood that other students need to also use the equipment, but if we were creating this for a level 6 animation, for a final year animation, we would b=need to look at borrowing a camera and having a secure set us so nothing would be touched.

I also learnt a lot more about after effects and dragon frame, now we had been left to explore it further ourselves though this animation, we were able to find out new things and ways of using the program that worked for us. We did had a few problems with stabilizing the film, but with help for tutors we managed to get this sorted, so now we know for the next time we need to use the program exactly what needs to be done to fix the problems we were faced with. 

I also enjoyed working with other people for the voices and think that they really fit with the characters to give them an appropriate personality. I think that just asking as if for an interview worked so much better than a script, the audio now is funnier, and has realistic pauses and breathing ect, so I’m so glad we decided to change it from reading a script

Time schedule wise we did fall behind a little coming up to Easter, this was because we had problems with out set, but we still managed to hit the deadline in good time, because we made the effort of coming into uni extra days as we knew we needed it to be finished in good time so we had lots of time to edit anything in post production, and because this process of post production was a little new to use, we made sure we had the time to be able to ask for help from tutors.

Despite all this I am really proud of what we have achieved to say this is both our first major stop motion film. And I can not wait to do another project working with this technique again. I have learnt so much about the whole process from ideas to editing, and I think that the next time I come to doing a stop motion with plasticine/fimo I will know exactly what I’m doing, and this will allow more time for animating and producing an even better, smoother animation, suitable for festivals or the like.

Animated Documentary - Animated Tails

This is our final animation all complete! Yes there are still some jumps and light flicker etc, but for a first major stop motion project, I'm so happy with our outcome. I feel that we've leart so much throughout this module and can apply out new knowledge into future projects.

Animated documentary - finalising animation

 The final bit to do on this project is to come up with a title and add it to the beginning of the animation, to introduce the film.

I created a mind map to help us come up with different options. At the moment we like something like 'Animated life' or 'animated tales/tails' 

Ciara is creating the dvd cover, and so I will either use this for the title credit or base it around the cover, depending on it's outcome.

There were some little bit we had forgotten about like background sound but this was easily fixed and we found a few sounds we could use for Ciara to put along with the video.

Animated Documentary - sheep fix

Clip before

Ciara managed to fix the flicker on the sheep video, which is great because that was something that really stood out in the video. However a new problem arose when there was a jump between the scene one and two, so I went back and fixed this by importing scene one and lowering the opasity so I could move the video back into place. 

There sill is a slight jump, but it's so quick it might not be that noticable. 

Clip after

Animated documentary - birds re stabilized

The stablisation of the bird scene really annoyed me, so I went back to try and fix it, Ciara suggested making the video larger so it wouln't jump around as much, I did this and then re stablised the video useing different tracking points, I also selected the rotation option to see if it would correct it further,I also put a mask round more of the set to try and get rid of some of the wobbly motion around the edges, and I think it does look a lot better, so maybe it just needed differnt points to track.






 I also then just had to get rid of a black jump that had been created after the stabiliation, but this was simple, I just deleted that frame and replaced it with the same as the next frame, which it should have been, so it works now. 

Animated documentary - rough edit

I've put together a rough edit, there are a few parts that will need to be fixed.

Sheep - there's flickering though out, but even with colour correction, brightness correction etc, it doesn't seem to be improving

Newt - theres a wobbly outline visible on a particulaer scene, but I'm not sure how else to fix this with the key lighting.

Birds - hasn't really been stabilized so I'm going to re do the stabilization and try to fix this. 

My main concerns are with the sheep and the birds, I think these are the most noticable and should be fixed, so I'm going to go back and correct these.

Animated Documentary - adding backgrounds

After stabilizing, I added the background. We'd tested with backgrounds before and a main isuse was the glow around the set and characters, I used the pend tool to go round the foreground further, but in some scenes (scene 2 of the newt especially) the key light effected parts of the body, which I'm not sure how else to make this better, I'de put a mask round, adusedted the glow, smoothness etc. To watch is as a one off you don't pick up on it that much, but because I've worked with it for so long, it really bugs me. But I can't cut anymore into the glow around the model or character because it effected the characters

Animated Documentary - stabilizing the clips

To get my head around stablising, I firstly tried to following Martin had given us and some the steps I found online, by using the warp stabilizer. This didn't go too great as it kept failing on me, and I could find what Martin told us about having two tracking point, so I thought it would be best to ask again at uni.

Annabeth helped us with stabilizing today,she said that After effects may be getting confused with the black spaces between each scene, and advised us to do each scene seperate. I expoted out the scene in each part and when showed how to have two tracking points this worked out better. I took the sheep and the bird part, so we had equal amount to stablize, but I found the sheep didn't really need stablising with shows how much we've progressed with our animating.

I selected two point so that it would line them up to stablise and crete as little motion of the set as possible.