Animation 2B: Sem 2, Week 9-11 + Spring Break

Week 9

Unfortunately, I didn't get much work done this week as I was catching up on my two other courses as I fell behind while working on 10x10x22. However, I still managed to get some animation done. I was mainly focusing on getting the cats' animations done and then was planning to animate the dragonfly afterwards.

Week 10

In week 10 I focused on animating the scene where the cat first tries to catch the dragonfly. I tried to use some smearing in the animation but I think I may have gone a bit overboard in a few scenes. 

Week 11

In week 11 most of my attention was focused on my group animation for Animation 2C so I didn't get much done. I ended up just working on a single scene where the cat prepares to leap at the dragonfly.

Spring Break

The last two weeks before the deadline were quite intense. Alongside working on the short film, I also had to work on a long essay and my group animated documentary which made it quite hard to balance the workload. Due to this, I was unable to animate the full short film and I made the decision to cut it in half. I was quite disappointed in myself for having to resort to that but I'm going to try and learn from this experience so that in the future I won't need to do this again.

Due to the previously stated reason, I also was unable to add all of the sound effects however I don't think that this is a big issue. I feel that the music ( The Hills Yonder by Robin Appelqvist on YouTube) and the ambience sound effect (found on freesounds.org) which I added make up for the lack of effects. 

At the start of the course, I was also a bit concerned about my decision to mix 2D and 3D however I think that it worked out really well. Using a 3D environment gave me the ability to create a much more vibrant and detailed environment than I would have been able to do in 2D in the same amount of time and I think this was very important in making my plain white characters stand out. I believe this hybrid method may be something that I would like to pursue in a future project so I will try and continue developing this style during summer break. 

Although I'm really disappointed that I had to cut out so many scenes, I am still quite happy with the scenes that I did finish. I think they look quite nice and the animation is also quite fluid. I would say that my favourite scene is definitely the scene where the cat gets up and starts chasing the dragonfly. I found the scene to be very difficult to animate due to the cats' movement and I'm really proud of the final result. 

If I had to do this project again, I would definitely make sure to plan my work schedule a lot better. I feel that if I had done that then I would be able to complete a bigger portion of the film. Alongside this, I would focus less on making every single frame perfect. Perfectionism is one of the things I still struggle with often makes me work slower than I would have preferred.

In summary, this project is not my proudest work however I think it served as a very important lesson in the importance of proper time management.