My final Animation for year 1 Illustration!

 This is my final animation including post production for year 1 illustration. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed creating it. I will discuss below how my process went, what I did and what hurdles I met along the way as well as the use of the 12 principles that I attempted to apply. ( Sound on! ) 

I hope you enjoyed! 

Evaluation: 

How I made the animation: 

This animation has been created in Adobe animate. We had a few sessions learning how to use the programme which were really effective in giving me a baseline understanding, however I must confess when I got to animating some of what we had learnt slipped my mind. I had to figure out how to change the opacity on layers, for example. I also didn't know how to change my brush size and spent a lot of time in the menu bars trying to find certain features. 

in terms of post production, this was all done in Adobe premier; I hit a hurdle immediately with this because I couldn't for the life of me remember how to export as an image sequence so that I could change the timing of the animation in post if I needed to. I actually never worked out how to do this but I got around it by exporting each scene individually and doing a lot of the timing in animate. This allowed me to change the timing of an entire scene and animate camera movement easier than if I had just exported as one long animation. I also took quite a bit of time doing the animation of the fade in fade out and the camera because I was rusty on what we had been shown, but got there in the end!

Hurdles in animation: 

The main hurdle I faced was that I was constantly trying to battle the feeling that the movement was too choppy and too much like an animatic rather than an animation, but also trying to balance this with my animation plan and how much time I actually had to animate. I still feel the end result is quite choppy and could have used more frames in between keyframes but I hope that you will agree it is not as choppy as an animatic. There are a lot of frames there! It took a lot of hours even for this level of finish. 

I also struggled a bit with anatomy, as I always do, its hard to picture some of the movements and I found myself doing a lot of acting out to figure it out. Photographs of my hands, and in the scene where he flicks the cigar I actually was holding my left hand up the entire time whilst drawing the keyframes, doing the movement as if my hand was keyframed! 

By far the hardest thing was probably timing , especially when there's a lot of different movement like in scene 1, trying to get all those layers to work timing wise was tough but I hope I mostly got there. 

The 12 principles and how I have applied them: 

Squash and stretch- I have used squash and stretch on a lot of the movement, its subtle due to the style, but how the faces move and change demonstrates this principle. I hope that in the final animation this comes across effectively.  The hair and other smaller elements also demonstrate squash and stretch with the way they move in the wind. 

Anticipation- I have used anticipation with for example the man in scene one who is lifting the other man, again it is subtle due to the realistic style I have chosen, so there is no cartoon  build up, but i have still used anticipation to demonstrate how he is struggling to lift his fallen comrade. There is other smaller examples of anticipation but you have to look a little closer than if it was a more cartoon style. 

Staging- I feel my staging is very clear, each scene has been planned with staging in mind to create a dynamic and visually interesting scene. 

straight ahead and pose to pose- The man who is crawling along , was created using straight ahead animation. I didn't know how many frames it was going to take to make this look realistic and I didn't want it to feel like it had no weight. The characters in scene 1 however, are pose to pose animated, so there was a lot of variety in how I animated this piece for maximum results. 

follow through/overlapping action- I added the wind to this sequence because I knew it would be perfect for demonstrating these principles as well as adding to the environment and creating more visual interest. You can see from the shadow how the clothes overlap and follow through and I have used a few examples of this throughout. Its not perfect and there was not too many opportunities in my design to show as much follow through as I would have liked but I hope I have still demonstrated this principle affectively. 

Slow in and slow out- The most obvious use of this in my animation is the section where Louis XIV blows out the smoke from his cigar, it starts slow, quickens and slows again. I would have liked to include more of this principle and in hind sight I think my planning could of helped. A lot of the motion in my animation is already mid way through when the scene starts, Ive done this because it works well with the tone of the overall story but I don't think it lends itself as much to demonstrating this principle. I do hope I have done enough however to demonstrate that I understand the principle. 

Arc- Check out the motion of the crawling mans arms, or the leg stepping into frame. I have tried to keep this principle in mind for all the movement to keep it feeling organic. 

Secondary action- The hair, the eyes and mouth of some characters , clothing, have all been used to demonstrate secondary action. 

Timing- I put a lot of focus on this principle because it is SO important, in my opinion the most important even. There is timing in the way that the man drags himself along the floor and has to take breaks between pushes. There's timing in the man lifting the other man. Timing has been used to demonstrate weight of objects but also the speed of the wind blowing is entirely down to the timing of the secondary actions. I would go as far as to say there has been timing applied to all moving parts, some more effectively than others. 

Exaggeration- There is not much exaggeration in my animation unfortunately, I would argue that there is some, look how exaggerated that pan up sequence is on Louis XIV for example. Trying to keep a real style but also demonstrating this principle is a bit tricky, I hope that I have no compromised on either and that the outcome is a success.

Solid drawing- This is a little down to opinion, however I believe there is solid drawing here. At any rate, everyone I have shown has been able to tell instantly what everything is, there is no confusion as to what my drawings represent. I hope my viewers will consider these solid drawings. 

Appeal- again, its hard for me to say as the artist but I hope that my animation has appeal.  I have had feedback saying that it feels very epic, he looks very 'badass' for lack of a better word, I believe it has appeal and I hope you will think so too! The music certainly adds to the appeal too. 

Overall, I'm proud of this, I wanted to show that I understood the principles and I wanted to show too that I can get my head down and produce a decent amount of work. I stretched myself beyond one panel of my story board, not only did I do the entire story board but I even added a scene of him taking a drag of his cigar. Ive really toiled over this work to make it as good as I can in the amount of time I had, and although I can recognise many flaws with the final outcome I feel its a success. 

Id love for more feedback on this animation , tips for improving especially!