Practice Animation - Evaluation

So the animation was done and we had to present it to the class. How did that go? Well, let's find out.

Presentation

 I reflect on the presentation with disappointment. Obviously it doesn't look like much here, because I believe the idea of a *presentation* is to put very little on the board and bring the heavy details in through, y'know, presenting. But apparently I missed the memo on what this was meant to be, because everyone else seemed to have a lot of text and also their entire pre-production folder within their presentation. Either way, it still went okay. Here's some feedback.

Feedback

Here's where my real problems come in. Everyone was really nice to me and dealt pretty much no criticism, despite the fact that the animation is a piece of trash. I'm aware of that, and I'm aware of the reasons for it being trash, so I really wouldn't have minded people taking a dig at it. In current state, it kind of feels like I'm just getting the same level and kind of feedback, no matter what state the finished product is actually in. Now I know how Apple feels.

ZING!

Anyway, as serious pointers for improving.

I've already got my pointers noted in the presentation up there, but here are the two big notes for me:

1: Buy a Remote

Handled that. Literally bought it as soon as I was finished shooting this animation. I've learned from my novice mistake this time, and am ready for what's next.

2: More coherent teamwork

Or preferably, none. I mean nothing against Sapfron, because honestly I don't think there's anyone in the class I could have been more content being with, but I just didn't enjoy or understand the teamwork element in this assignment. Firstly it made the same mistake as Short Film and Multi-Camera did in Year 1 by seemingly gifting creative control to everyone, which DOES NOT WORK. Especially for something as experimental as amateur cutout animation, I don't understand expecting two people to share or at least feel passion for the same ideas.

Secondly, it put a lot of pressure on getting the actual production done during class, which once again I did not feel worked. Every example we were shown was created in a certain environment, with the right equipment and lighting conditions and time.

I'm not blaming anyone or anything other than myself for how crappy my particular animation was this time around, but all the same I will be requesting to work alone for this final attempt at it. I've heard it will otherwise now be handled by teams of four, which I'm not particularly game for.

Practice Animation - Post-Production

Due to the small pool of material I had after the shoot, the edit was always going to be a bit easy. I headed into the college sound booth and recorded all the voiceover/dialogue myself, and then got cracking on throwing the thing together.

Here is what it looked like at the end on Premiere:

And here is what it looked like at the end on YouTube:

Practice Animation - Production

Before you could even click your fingers at how fast time flies, it was time to produce a golly gosh darned animation!

I was feeling nervous, but the important thing was just getting on with it and seeing it through.

First off, though:

Set-Up and Testing

To shoot the animation, I set up in my room where there was plenty of room for equipment. I placed the background on a large circular desk, and then set up the lights. I used two soft boxes, both extended to about 75% of their maximum height and tilted at around a 45 degree angle downwards. I then flicked three of the five switches on for both lights, giving a strong but even light to the piece.

I then set up a C-Stand with my camera (a Canon 700D) screwed to the end, so that it hung over the animation for a perfect framing. I weighed down the lights and C-Stand with sandbags. I also set up an external display screen attached to the C-Stand and pointing away from the lights, to make it a lot easier to monitor how the picture was looking.

Everything seemed set up to make something good, that was until...

The Shoot

 So everything divebombed pretty quickly. It turned out that every time I took a shot with the camera, no matter how careful I was, the pressure of me pressing the button threw the camera just a little off frame. I struggled for a while with this, but without a remote (which I had failed to consider I might need), it soon became clear that getting any kind of consistent framing for a shoot featuring movement as complex as I had planned would be impossible. As with any production, compromise quickly became the word of the day. In the end I shot far less photos than I had hoped to, but figured it would be enough to at least create a narrative with.

To finish with something more appealing than some text, here's a picture of the background and character models sat on the table: