Elements Animation Evaluation

I feel like my Elements animation was quite a big project in what I wanted to achieve. From day one I had one thought in mind that I would keep to as a basic specification for the rest of my time developing the animation and that thought was that I wanted to create something that looked nice. In the past I had tended to focus more on character based things so characters were often my main priority when it came to developing an animation. But for this animation I wanted to challenge myself and do something I hadn't really done before. Instead of focussing my attention on characters, I would create an animation with only one character and the rest of the story be told through visual representation.

Frequently throughout the animation, there were times where I could have dramatically saved time. For instance, for the first half of my time on this project I was working solely on computers, drawing with a mouse. I was working at a rate of around 12 frames every 63 hours which was incredibly slow. For me I was slightly resistant to move onto layout paper because I was very focussed on achieving realistic movements and felt that if I moved onto layout paper the movements of the 10 year old girl in my animation would become less consistent. Eventually, when it was pointed out to me that I was basically rotoscoping the footage I had of a girl on a swing in an effort to make the most realistic movements possible, I moved onto layout paper. I realised I should have been doing this from the start because the movements I was creating on layout paper were just as realistic, created in a fraction of the time.

In the end, I was very happy with the animation I produced for final critique. There were parts of the animation I felt I was really happy with, e.g. the sequence in which the grass engulfs the dog teddy's head and the sequence in which we see grass grow up around the teddy. And parts I was not so happy with such as the first shot we see of the girl on the swing. This was due to the fact that it was right at the time when I switched to layout paper, leaving this computer generated sequence behind to work on new scenes, so when I came back to this sequence very close to putting the animation together, it was apparent the sequence could have benefitted from a few added frames to make the sequence flow better.

Obviously I wish I could have coloured the entire animation. But due to lack of time, this task was basically impossible to complete before submission. Not to say i didn't have time to colour any of it, but if I was going to finish colouring any of it, it would be the grass scenes. I would still like to complete colouring the entire animation to put it into a portfolio. But that is no short task and is likely to take up a lot of time, if it is to be completed, it would have to be in my own time.