Research
My research was a mixture of looking at pre-existing sources and experimenting and generating my own ideas using my own imagination. However to be honest, I favoured my own idea development as the main research than looking at others work, that doesn’t mean I didn’t find anything of value, I was able to find very good reference videos and images which helped me to create fairly accurate movement for the animals.
It would have been nice to do further research into the humans but I found it more urgent to research animals more since I’ve never tried to animate animals before.
I mostly used youtube and images from art hosting websites such as deviantart and pinterest for reference.
In terms of story Cartoon Saloon are a big influence, wit both a film about a wolf person coming out soon and a film about selkies already under their belt they inspired a lot of the designs for the characters supernatural forms, with of course my own style making it slightly different, with larger eyes and, especially for the wolf, less stylized and more based on realism.
My designs
Cartoon Saloon’s Designs
I’ve also noticed that, maybe not being aware of it consciously but the human designs also take inspiration from cartoon saloon in terms of style and using shapes to create character design.
Planning and Time Managment
The big thing I feel about my time management is that I got far too ambitious with my idea, I didn’t keep it simple so became overwhelmed by the idea I’d chosen and subsequently made a project I wasn’t happy with and felt was not wrthy of a very good grade, if I’d gone for a simpler idea I could have expanded on it to make it a good animation.
I had a good animation schedule set up but I wrote that I’d be working everyday on things which, while isn’t wrong became overwhelming for me and caused me to lose interest in the project I was doing and ultimately produce a not great project with not much to it.
The colouring for the animation took far longer than I expected, I thought it would be done fairly quickly and in little time but it took a fair more weeks than I expected, causing other work I wanted to do and improve to be put by the wayside.
Developing
I changed a lot of the story as I began to runout of time and had to to try and cut parts to get it done in time, this sadly cause a lot of the story and scenes to be cut and changed to something that may not have made sense such as changing the characters from knowing about the transformation to not knowing and cutting out a lot of scenes that would focus on them and how their relationship changed.
I’d considered a couple of ideas for animating, such as the idea of a first time witch getting a job, I feel like I didn’t do enough brainstorming though because in the last few months of the project I came up with ideas that would be more do-able. I also think I din’t stretch myself out of my comfort zone to far in terms of ideas for stories, I kept most of my ideas fantasy based and didn’t really look into other genres and plot ideas.
I don’t think I spent enough time showing my development as much as thinking about it, I dedicated a fair bit to showing different design ideas for the characters which was good since the are the main focus, but subsequently left less time for developing background ideas and story.
Material Techniques and Processes
I experimented by using both pencil and computer based drawing programs as materials in development, I again feel I should have done more for this than I did and am disappointed that I hadn’t thought of enough ways to develop it.
I think that focusing mostly on digital and traditional character design helped me to make solid character animation, which is what I kind of wanted to focus on, excusing the cut animation due to time restraints in a couple places,
Final Outcome
I don’t think my project fulfilled the requirements of the brief, simply because I didn’t do enough and the things I did do I don’t feel I did in enough detail for it to be seen as fulfilling it, I ran out of time and didn’t spend enough time doing the pre-production I should have.
I do find that the actual animation is acceptable and that some parts of my sketchbook work seem good, particularly the written parts, however I just don’t feel like I did enough to deserve a good grade from fulfilling the brief.
As you can probably guess my FMP didn’t come out very well, it was incomplete in a lot of ways and was missing a lot of research and development that, while I thought about and made the change for, I never showed proof of, a silly mistake on my part.
In some ways the animation did turn out as I wanted, it followed the story fairly well and I was able to focus on character animation, something I like the most. However the animation sadly had to have a lot of the content I had intended to include cut out, so the story did lose a lot of the scenes I wanted it to have.
Strengths and Weaknesses
My biggest weakness is my time management, as I mentioned before I began to lose track of my time keeping I’d put on my schedule and ultimately didn’t do nearly as much as I wanted. To be honest I’m kind of ashamed about how little I feel I did and have began questioning if going to university for animation would be a good idea given how poorly I feel I did in this project.
I also find that a weakness of mine is to not annotate my research when I do it so a lot of my thinking processes and how I want to develop something isn’t included and not seen because I forget to write it.
However I did find that, even though this is only my second attempt at animating, I think I’ve improved a lot since last year, and have more knowledge on how to animate than I did last year and get more enjoyment from it than I did last year too.
I feel over the project I improved on being faster at animating and also just general understanding of timing and weight in animation has gotten better and while I didn’t improve it I’m now more aware of what I have to get better at for university to get a good grade.
Conclusion
I’m not going to say I did well in this fmp, because i didn’t I didn’t do nearly enough for a distinction like I’d wanted to and came out of the project less sure if I enjoyed and wanted to do animating as a job and university course. I’ve also come out of this project doubting my animating abilities, I feel my animating skills weren’t great to begin with but now I feel like my animating is far worse than I’d thought and no longer feel like I should go into animation.
If i did the project I wouldn’t have even done animation because I ended up getting overloaded with all the work I wanted to do that I barley did any of what I wanted. I probably would have just done concepts for an animated show or something like that, it would have been easier to do research for and I wouldn’t have had to do all the work that a full team of animators would be expected to do in the actual world of work, ad that on top of my over ambitious plan and I became overwhelmed and stressed easily.
The thing I’ve learnt most from this project, to be honest, is that animating isn’t something I would be good at enough to follow as a dream, simply because from this fmp I’ve realised I’m not good at the pre-production and research for it or the actual animating, this however leaves me at the conundrum of how I’m going onto an animation degree at university next year, and the fact I’m terrified of how I’m going to end up doing just as badly there as I feel I did in this fmp.
Although, now that I’ve identified my weakness here I can work on them so that I can become an amazing animation student at university and not feel as troubled and self-conscious about my abilities and also do work that I’m proud of because I was able to do it well.
My Online College Portfolio 