Reflection Over The Project

For this project I was asked to produce a 10 - 30 second animation that reflected my understanding/improvement as an animator over the past year studying on the course. This animation is going to be the only piece of my work documented at the end of year show, so ideally I wanted this animation to represent who I was as not only an animator but a student at Leeds College Of Art.


I felt from the very start, that I wanted this animation to not be 'too serious' - regarding how serious and disturbing my last project was for COP, where my short animation focused on the sexualisation of school girls. I want this animation to be fun, because I feel as a student that in the future I want to develop comedy within my animations rather then a darker theme; but that's not to say I'd ever abandon anything 'too serious' in future projects. After being inspired by harry partridge work on youtube (a short animation about how he became an animator and possibilities of animation) I began drafting up a few rough ideas, one was 'the day in the life of an animator' but I scrapped that one and decided in the end to go for 'the animation process'.

 The rough idea was that I was going to create an animation that documents the routine I've been doing for each project to finish an animation, using a 'cartoon' version of myself to help show this. Starting with the storyboards and animatic I outlined the sequences I wanted to show, such as concept and coloring; all together I had around 10 of them but slimmed it down to 7 because of a time limit of 30seconds. I also wanted to record a short song to go along side the animation, much like Harry Partidge had featured in his animation - a short song about animation or something like that. But again, because of time limit I scrapped the idea in the last week of production, because I hadn't even started thinking about lyrics. Instead I replaced the audio idea with an upbeat silly song featured in GTA 5 that I've been playing a lot recently.

I began work on the project, originally by hand but once being told we were running low on paper - I abandoned hand drawn and instead began animating 'by hand' on Photoshop. I didn't have much experience animating on Photoshop, I had experimented with it a few times but rarely with the 'timeline' feature. After a few false starts I began work using this feature and onion skinning (an option that replicates hand drawn animation by allowing each frame to be slightly transparent, there for making it easier to animation from frame to frame) I used different layers set to the timeline to add color and 'blush'. I also began to manipulate the functions in After Effects to save time, such as the key frames I could assassin images and their position/scale in the animation - achieving very simple and time saving movements where at first I would spend hours maintaining form I could now move simply in a few seconds. Saving me A LOT of time over all...

Stitching the segments together in After Effects was easy, considering I'd been using the software since the beginning of the year I've really gotten used to its functions and the routine of editing and rendering an animation using it. After adding music - I uploaded it online.

Looking back over the project, I'm really proud of what I managed to accomplish and animate. I was very disapointed when I was told we'd ran out of paper and I would of loved animating all of this by hand, but I suppose that just how things go when youv'e got limited resources. Despite the animation itself not being very mature, I sort of like that. At the end of the day I understand I am training to be a professional, I understand I need to take things seriously in order to pay the bills - But as a student here, I've had so much fun. I don't think I've ever had as much fun working as I have on this course and over this past year and I felt like I wanted - NEEDED - to have that fun and laughter within my work.  I'm very proud of my animation, (despite depicting myself as a muscular man at the very end of the animation).