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.