Evaluation

Throughout this course I have learnt so much as we've covered so much content. The entire module has been about learning animation skills and the 12 principles of animation, in particular applying the 12 principles of animation to our own work. We began with storyboarding potential animations of our own. Initially I was skeptical about storyboarding because I just wanted to dive straight into creating animation, it was soon that I learnt how important the storyboarding process is. My storyboard needed to be clear and easy to understand so it could be simple to follow if I was the animator going to animate it.

When we were tasked to create to create flip-books I felt it would be the simplest thing in the world to do. I was not at all prepared for just how much skill is involved to create a flip-book that flows well. We had to factor so many aspects into account with just a simple ball bouncing up and down movement for example timing (a problem I had with my ball animation is that my ball would move at the same speed throughout the animation when it should speed up and slow down) and squash and stretch.

I feel my flip-book animation skills have improved greatly and feel these skills can be applied to every form of animation. The concept of squash and stretch I have used on every animation I have created since, obviously this concept is much harder to apply to pixilations.

I found the Pendulum animation far easier to create than my flip-books. I feel this is because the experience I had creating my flip-books gave me more confidence that I could apply to proceeding animations. When I played my pendulum back it ran much smoother than anything I had created in the past.

I feel not only my animation skills have improved throughout the module, but so has how I approach animation. I feel like now I approach animation with a lot more planning because I now realise that without an effective plan I can only get so far without either hitting a wall or it effecting how well my animation flows.

When it came to creating a pixilation I admittedly did not dedicate as much time to it as I should have done. Because it was live-action photography I felt that I did not need to plan it out as much as a drawn animation. My lack of planning was evident when I played my final pixilation back but when I created another pixilation in Apply it allowed me the opportunity to vastly approve on my skills and create something of a far higher quality due to more thought out planning.

Overall, I have found this module incredibly interesting and I have learnt so much that I can apply to my own skills. I feel that although I still have so much to learn about even the most simplest forms of animation, I now have the confidence to try new things I would before have been to skeptical to ever attempt.