Reflection

During the time allocated to us, we had to come up with characters, stories, ideas etc and develop it and upload them into our own personal blog. Each week we were told to upload a few pieces of work and maybe talk about them. We were also told to compare two 2d or 3d programs, discuss the animation principles and talk a bit about lip synch.

Normally, I wouldn’t research about lip synch but after doing so, I’ve learned a few new things that could help me later in the future. One being the importance of getting the mouth shape right to match the sounds in a sentence/phrase said. The same can be said for the animation principles. I never knew there was such a thing! Most animations seem to follow these set of rules one way or another (some animations do not use all principles). It was interest ding learning and researching each principle, it definitely helped me understand how to make an animation successful and how to portray the right message across to the audience.
I also animated a walk cycle on two 2d programs - flash and toon boom. The reason for this was, I wanted first hand fresh experience of the twp programs, animating the same thing, before a make a comparison - just to be more accurate. In the end, toon boom won just because it was a lot easier to draw and it did not try and help me by “straightening out” my curved lines. The interface on toon boom was also easier to understand (e.g. the symbols were more recognisable etc). Also, for both programs I used my Wacom graphics tablet and realised the lines looked better on toon boom than flash! So overall, toon boom wins hands down.

I also throughout the 6 weeks, found myself changing my mind a lot - being very indecisive. Id think of an idea… end up forgetting it because I came up with another one then forgetting that one and came up with another one because I never really liked the ideas I had to stick with them. Even after the 6 weeks, I’m still not 100% confident in my mecha/robot designs. However, I will definitely finalise them before I start to animate them.



~ Message from the little elf ~