Evaluation of FMP

Final Animation

Video

Introduction 

My FMP was an animation on the themes of how personality and identity can be flattened and crushed by monotonous everyday life. It revolves around a man who's dream of living in a peaceful cottage on a hill have been crushed by things such as debt, loans and bills and how he eventually breaks the cycle and does his own thing. I chose the theme as it is very relevant in today's society with issues such as the predicted age to stop working being higher and higher each year and the tough state of the economy leaving people with barely any money to go on a break. I had worked on the project by beginning with tasks like writing out a schedule and planning out story boards.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Here are some strengths and weaknesses I've developed/come across during the animation process.

Strengths-

1. I feel the animation process went smoothly with little to no problems throughout; I practically used the full three weeks dedicated purely to animation and the last two-five days being used to edit sound.
2. Because I was already familiar with Flash there was plenty of room to refine/learn new techniques; for example I refined my knowledge of motion tweens and got familiar with them again.
3. I personally learned to discipline myself in the sense that I've increased my ability to focus on a project for a long period of time. The monotony of animation helped me get into a cycle in which I would be purely focused on the animation process to the extent that I could get a lot done in an hour.
4. I've learned a bit about set design on Flash as before I was mainly using Photoshop to do all my set design. I mainly learned how to break objects apart and  put them into separate layers.

Weaknesses- 

1. Sometimes I could be a bit careless in the sense that I would've exported a "finished" animation only to find that I left out audio/forgotten to put in an animation scene.
2. I had changed idea before production begun, this meant I had to plan out a different timeline with different characters and themes.
3. I finished my animation and sound a bit later then I wanted to; this left me with less time to do things such as make an early start on my evaluation.
4. I was sick on one of my designated animation days so I lost a whole day I could've used to animate. This set me back a bit on the animation process

Main influences

Animation wise I borrowed some of the design from youtube animations such as the animated segments from the video series "Crash course-World History"; below you can see some examples from the "Crash Course" series compared to my work:

As you can see both sets of characters have very simplistic faces with little to no detail apart from eyes. Also you will notice that the way in which the characters move is very reminiscent of the animated T.V. show "South Park".  I used my own personal experiences for the theme of my FMP; mainly my frustration at how boring and repetitive my own life is. When I occasionally watch the news I hear of state pension age rising which means people are retiring when they are older; this got me thinking about how a repetitive lifestyle would get to somebody after ages of being in it. 

Experiments and Exploration 

The very first thing I explored and experimented with is the plot line of my FMP. I first decided to do an animation that revolved around four people in a line and how there careers/roles change throughout history(for example I would have started with hunter gatherer people and moved onto the ancient Greek/Roman period with the characters donning clothing and items relating to the main career paths at the time). I decided I didn't want to do this as I felt there was not much room to be creatively thinking about a plot; this led me to choose the custom story I have now as I could have a bigger control over the premise and the world around the characters. Time constraints did not help either as I felt 2-3 minuets was not enough time to convey all the info in the timeline story.

I also experimented with character designs; below is the concept art for my characters:

As you can see there are a range of designs for the heads, bodies, arms and legs of the characters. You may notice that the characters all happen to wear suits; this was because I had already planned out my story before hand so I knew I wanted my characters to have some form of clothing relating to their profession on them. Of course in the final product it's nothing like that as the characters only seem to wear what piece of clothing I randomly thought of; mainly hats as they are more pronounced and distinguishable then different coloured suits. 

Comparison to Similar pieces of work 

I will be comparing some of my animation to one of the thought bubble videos about the Persians and the Greeks. 

Linked here

Here is part of the first scene:

Straight away you can see that the Crash Course scene on the top is a lot more detailed then my scene at the bottom. You can see that their hills and mountains have shadows and indentations to signify depth whilst my scene only has a hill overlapping the over hill to signify depth.

The Crash Course video also has a varying art style whist my animation maintains a consistent art style. This can be explained by the fact that I cannot draw and it's only me working on the project whilst the Crash Course crew have a whole production team with different artists. Also I aim to keep my animation simplistic so by conventions of minimalism there wouldn't be any other art styles other then my simplistic art style.

Lastly you can see that the Crash Course video utilises other forms of communication other then just visual. There they are talking about an ideology using a dictionary definition whilst I convey info much more visually and dynamically. This makes sense though as the Crash Course video has someone narrating it to keep the video from being a tedious read; on the other hand I don't have someone narrating so if I used dialogue there would be a risk of it becoming tedious and boring.

Peer Views

When I showed the first version of my animation to my peers most of them enjoyed it but there were some issues brought up; mostly due to some of the scenes being a bit long in length and seeming like they were drawn out. In my latest version of the animation I corrected this by speeding up the FPS(Frames Per Second) and by lengtherning some of the animated sequences(Mainly characters walking). I lengthened the individual frames from 1 space long to 2 frames long; if I didn't lengthing the frames then the walking animation woud've looked like the characters are just sliding along the floor instead of just walking. I also heard that the desk didn't look like a desk at first; you can see in my final animation I've corrected this by making one of the characters move objects such as paper and pens out of the way as he looks for the etchings on the desk.

Some of my peers commented on the fact that some of the sound diddn't sync to the character's movements; this was due to me hurrying the process up so I can get an animation out quicker and not paying attention to the little details. In my latest version I took every criticism into account and acted on them accordingly(by syncing the sound, tweaking the animation etc.).

Key Areas of Development 

The main development was my attitude towards focusing and dicipline when it comes to working on an animation; I would say I developed this when I reliesed the slow pace I was going at during the begining of the animation. I acted on this by coming in early and sometimes spending some time after college to work on my animation. I would also say I managed to refine my Flash skills when it comes to motion tweening; I had trouble with the motion tweening at first but after playing around with it I managed to get used to it. On Adobe Premier I've learned how to get audio to fade out instead of just coming to an abrupt stop suddenly; I learned this through the built in teaching program on Premier.