🌸 Animation 1A – Formative Reflection

 

Animation 1A - Formative Reflection

At the start of the course I found it quite difficult as I had to go back to working with just basic shapes instead of more complex subjects however after a while I really started to enjoy it. One thing which surprised me was how much you can do with just simple shapes and this taught me that you can make an interesting animation without any characters.

While working on the tasks I noticed that I was spending a very large amount of time on the initial rough sketches of the animation so if I got the chance to work on some of those tasks again I would spend less time doing that. I feel like I focused too much on the detail in those sketches instead of aiming to get the base movement down and adding the detail later, thus wasting a lot of time in that stage. Alongside this I spent a lot of time preparing paper for animating so I’m planning to work on future projects digitally in order to save time.

One thing that I found slightly difficult at first was doing the initial planning and research prior to starting to animate even if the final animation is quite simple. A couple of times I went straight into animating without doing thumbnails because I had a rough idea in my head and ended up getting stuck on how I wanted the animation to end or how I wanted the object to move which led me to having to redraw a lot of frames or restarting completely, thus wasting quite a lot of time. Since then I have learned how important that stage is and now do my best to spend some time getting my ideas down on paper and making sure I know exactly what I’ll be doing so I don’t repeat those mistakes again.

Two YouTube channels which I found very useful were AlanBeckerTutorials and Ethan Becker. AlanBeckerTutorials has quite a lot of good videos ranging from the 12 basics of animation to Adobe software tutorials which I found very helpful as someone who doesn’t have much experience using Adobe products. Prior to starting university I studied the principles of animation however his video helped me understand everything a lot better. Ethan Becker has made videos about making storyboards, designing characters for animation and breakdowns of animated scenes which I believe will be very useful in the future when we get to work with characters. Alongside these I have also found the books “The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation” and “The Animator’s Survival Kit” to be quite useful as they go over the basics of animation but also topics such as animating dialogue. Anytime I referenced something from either of the books I made sure to make a note in a Word file so that when I am uploading my work on my blog I could include the original too.

My favourite part of the process would definitely be creating the animation although I also really enjoyed producing it and seeing how it plays for the first time. Previously I found the production stage quite unpleasant as it took a very long time to take pictures of all the frames and I had to hold my phone myself which often resulted in some frames not lining up properly due to my hand moving however the animation kit changed that. Since I received that kit producing has been a lot easier and the quality of pictures also improved greatly thanks to the animation rostrum and the led lamp.

At the start of the semester I aimed to improve my traditional animation skills as in the past I mostly focused on digital animation and I believe that I have achieved that. To do that I mostly animated on paper which helped me explore different ways I can achieve certain effects with only a marker. This has taught me that I don’t have to rely on digital tools as much as I used to and I think that my future digital animations will also be a lot better because of this experience. Overall I am quite happy with the work I produced.