A Final Animation

I wanted to put an unofficial close on this brief by creating a really short animation that had some planning behind it, rather than just some testers and try outs that looked pretty, but had no structure to them. So I planned a storyboard out, inspired by the techniques discussed in an earlier post about recent carphone warehouse ads, I planned out the sheets of paper to form part of my animation...

I found that as I had planned what I was doing and as I had pre-drawn the sheets out that I needed, I managed to finish photographing everything a lot quicker than I expected, (still over a couple of hours mind). I decided I'd carry on just playing around with what was in front of me, so here's the first draft through of all of the photos together.
(It starts off really bad quality, sorry I don't know why youtube didn't like it?!)


I had a quick chat with Matt about different effects and things I could do to my animation, here's a draft of the frames with the green card taken out with keylight effects. (You can tell as well by the change in colour of the pen)...

[I have tried loading this video up in full, but Youtube just isn't accepting the video, tried working it out with Matt but he couldn't understand why it wouldn't work either, Tutors, there's a saved version of this video in full on my memory stick titled 'Tadahhh draft 2'... sorry!]

There's a lot wrong with the general look of the animation and there's a lot of tweaking I need to do to it to make it look easier on the eye. The two main things that stand out to me is the brightness/contrast levels need adjusting, and in the corners in particular where the keylight effect has left some funny looking shadings, I need to alter some keying effects. More to work on, but still I'm slowly getting somewhere.




I wanted to add sound to this and I wanted to animate over the top of this, but due to general problems getting on top of me I've been struggling to fix everything all together. I'm still really pleased I've managed to get the start of this rolling though as it's shown me how important it is to story board, and how much easier it makes putting everything together in the long run.


While I was with Matt, he showed me a few things that were possibilities to work with over my animation, including altering the speed by using a plug-in called Twixtor 4.5 - with this you can speed up and add a motion blur, or slow down and using the smart blend tool, the software adds in frames to help 'morph' the footage along, it's not designed for animation, but it looked really bizarre and got my mind ticking about so much more I could delve into.

It made me realise how much is actually possible and how I'm finding it really difficult to get to grips with; I'm so overwhelmed by how much is actually possible with just one piece of software and how little I really know. I can be quite critical of myself and become annoyed that I haven't done enough of putting my findings into practice, this then makes me question how well I have structured my time through this brief. But on the positive side, if I hadn't sat researching through watching all of the animations that I have, I wouldn't have come across ideas, inspirations, or the different styles and techniques that I have come across. Maybe I just shouldn't be too hard on myself?