Animation Evaluation

Evaluation
As a final project, my group came up with the idea of attempting to animate a game of consequences. This game is where people take it in turns to draw or write, before folding the page so that it becomes hidden. The next person must continue the drawing or writing without the knowledge of what has gone before. It often creates hilarious or surreal results.

We thought it would make an excellent animation project, and I think it did work fairly well. However, I feel like we encountered a large number of difficulties which stopped our animation reaching its full potential. Firstly, our group found it very difficult to begin on the actual animation itself, as we all lived in different cities and were apart for the 3-4 weeks of Easter holidays.

Thinking about this in hindsight, we could have used this to our advantage as the game we were playing and therefore the project involves a large factor of ‘unknown’ and so we probably could have begun it separately and had a mini game of consequences by putting what we had made individually together when we came back from Easter.

Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to plan that effectively, meaning we cut ourselves short of time to work on the project. Once we did get going however, we found that our ideas were working well, and managed to create both a test piece, and a final one within a short space of time, both of which we felt excited and pleased with.
The only downside here was our technical difficulties, the cameras, hard drives and computers all seemed against us, and slowed down the technical and digital side of things considerably. As well as this, both myself and another member of the group felt all a bit bewildered by the Adobe software we were using as we had not used it before.

One of the successes I feel occurred from this project was how greatly improved my digital skills, and understanding of the software and processes is now. Although at times it felt like a massive struggle, I am pleased that I was able to overcome this particular problem, along with the other unconfident member of my group. I now feel confident enough to want to try to make more animations in the future, and work through the digital processes alone.

Another success I think, is the film itself. The drawings maybe quite crude, and the idea simple, but I do think it is quite effective. We made two animations in the end, one from our test game and one final polished film. Personally, I prefer the test animation as it shows the game of consequences more truly, with the spaces left where the paper would have been folded over the visible parts of the image. This was edited out of the final animation as we wanted to see which would be more effective. It has left the animation much cleaner, and ‘better looking’ but I think it defeats our original idea slightly and becomes more of a straight ‘drawing exercise’.
If we had more time to work on it, I would like to have a go at animating the paper folding over itself. I would also concentrate more carefully on time management, as I think that was our main downfall in this project.

I have found myself being very interested in the processes of animation, including pixilation, stop motion and the digital side of things too. It was something I had no previous experience in but hope to continue in the future, as creating these films have given me so many ideas of how I could bring my Illustration work to life. Illustration, which is my normal practise, and animation work hand in hand together, so I feel I have learnt an invaluable skill which I will be able to use to expand my portfolio of work in the future.