Animation Blog - Evalution

While doing our blog, Tara and I hit many hurdles that we either had to jump over or that we had cut out and think something else up. To start off, our main problem was that we didn’t think of a story board before we started our animation, we only thought of a couple seconds and thought as we went through, were I think that if we would have planned it before hand, that not only would the animation be more clear that it would have been easier for myself and Tara while doing the animation. If we would have planned it better also it would have run smoother for us. When it comes to the characters, we already knew that we wanted to use clay but yet again if we planned it better than we could have decided if there was another material that would have helped us or that would have been better with the animation that we were making.

Within our animation, we wanted to try and show the difference in days with our backgrounds and lighting but because we changed rooms half way through the animation it meant that we had different lighting in the beginning compared to the end. With moving the clay, we had to be very careful with our shadowing, which was really hard to towards the end of the animation because the day had gone to night we had to turn on the light but then this changed the lighting all over again as well as putting our shadows in the frames.

As we were worried we wouldn’t have enough time and started without really planning things out, I think that if we did actually plan a storyboard we would have thought about the materials more, where we might not have used clay. Even though was good as we needed our characters to move around a lot when moving them too much we ended up with the characters falling apart which meant it took us more time as we had to model them back to what they looked like in the beginning.

Another problem that we had was as it was a group assignment, when me and Tara were trying to find the time together it was becoming more difficult as we were very rarely free at the same time, which meant that were spending a lot of time on it over many days when we could fit in as were if it was an individual task it would have been a lot easier for myself as well as Tara as we could have done the animation when we were free instead of relying on each other.

Another problem we faced was the sound, we recorded music from YouTube for our intro and credits so we recorded it on Audacity saved it to my laptop and then put it on to Zu3D but what we didn’t know was once we tried to play it on a different computer that it wouldn’t play due to the actual recording not being on the computer.

I think that if I was going to make an animation myself again, I would make sure that I plan it out better and I would make sure that I had a story board in place before I decided what materials to use and what I would want in the background. I don’t think I would use Zu3D again, it is designed for children and I think with an adults head it made it a lot harder to use.

In this picture, I am remodelling 'Roxanne' because when we kept moving her she kept falling apart.