Evaluation

Time to get all evaluation-y on my latest finished project. It's been long enough since finishing it that I can actually evaluate it as opposed to just hating it which is my usual response to a finished piece of work .

When I set out I decided as a sort of side objective/goal that I wanted to create something very stylized to really fit with the theme of the brief. I feel this has been achieved.

Secondary Objective was to be a bit more realistic and less over ambitious. This I think I managed to fail.

As with many of my projects I feel my idea was fairly ambitious because of the timescale I had to complete it in. Due to wanting to complete the animation for the deadline I don't think I spent enough time thinking of different ideas. Instead I had a good one and ran with it.

I did change my workflow in the planning stage to, I feel, better fit the brief. As it was very character centered I decided I would come up with what the character would be like, personality etc, before I started coming up with any visual ideas. This I hoped would make sure that the visuals really represented the characters personality, making it easy for the audience to understand the character.

I also did a lot of research into good practises and things to ask yourself about the character you're creating which I felt really helped the character creation process. I also did a lot of deconstruction of relevant animations/characters that influenced the creation of my own so I could understand what I enjoyed about these characters and hopefully use it to improve my own designs.

After a talk from Bob the Builder creator Curtis Jobling, I decided ,as it filled the time requirement of the brief, to create the intro/title sequence as my animation. As if it was the intro to it as a real tv series. I discovered in my research that in kids tv shows it is usual for the intro to include all the backstory so that anyone can sit down and watch an episode and completely understand what is happening. However although with good intention the scope of my idea would have been better suited to the first 12-20 minute episode rather than the 30-60 intro.

I feel most of the projects shortcoming develop from this problem. Due to time that would be required to model, rig , texture, animate and render all the characters and sets in my idea I chose to use a combination of 3D and 2D cutouts (much like stage props) to create the animation. This way only some of the scenes and one of the character were modelled, textured etc in 3D. The theory was that this would help keep to the brief by focusing more on one character, my protagonist Isaac. This style was something new for me to experiment with, but in the end I cant help but feel that everything would have looked better if it had all been made in 3D. Due to time running out I didnt manage to get my voice over for the animation which would really help to make sure people can understand what is happening. Also there is much to my annoyance one scene that I couldnt finish the occlusion pass for, meaning it doesnt look as good as it should.

Anyway rant over, I'm sure I can think of more but that will do for now