For this assignment I decided that I would base my
project on an animation with both sound and voice acting included. This would
be an incredibly tough task to tackle with both time and to keep it looking
effective. I first decided to look into the business and history of animation,
the main two companies to look at would be Disney and Studio Ghibli, companies
known world wide for their art. The two companies were both known for their
very different approach, studio Ghibli drew up everything in their films and
didn’t alter anything other than to add small effects where as Disney’s process
was to draw up a collection of concepts and then recreate them through a
program in order to create 3D models and characters. I decided that I would stick
with Studio Ghibli as I believe that their approach is far more lovingly in
depth.
After this was all done, I then began creating the
animation, I started by drawing up a few smaller concepts of the characters and
then I moved immediately into Flash and drew up and each and every slide, every
small piece of movement had its own slide and after inching each limb I would
then create another and inch it a little further, when these were connected, it
would give the impression of movement, it did however go far faster than I
intended so I added an extra slide onto each to make it feel a little bit more
regular.
After this was done, I then
created a panoramic shot to show off the city that would be introduced through
the animation, this could have taken an incredible amount of time should I have
decided to do a new shot for each piece of movement, so I decided that the best
thing to do would be to create the entire image and leave some outside of the
slide, I would then progress to slowly move the city through the slide in the
same process that was used to create the rest of animation, this made the whole
process a lot easier and really made it look far more effective.
Once the city panned onto the
robot, I then decided that what I would do is give the robot, bright blue eyes,
this would give the effect that this creature would in some way have far more
life than the entire city around it, this way of thinking then became the
overall theme of the animation as I decided to keep the colourless effect.
After the animation was
complete, I then had to move onto the sounds, however, due to the animation
style and creating each slide separately, being so time consuming, I had very
little time to create the sounds and place them into animation, this was also
due to a large problem during our sound design course that also cut largely
into our whole development process, however, I was able to place in a couple of
sounds that at least gave the robot a little more character in the early
sections of the animation, this was all done by creating and recording sounds
and then editing them through Logic Pro, after this we then placed them into
Adobe Flash, I did this by putting them onto their own separate layer, separate
from the actual frames themselves.
This was placed onto Flash,
using the Flash library, which was done by bouncing the sounds in Logic Pro,
this was basically exporting the video into the Flash Library, after this was
done, we selected the video through the library and then placed into the
animation.
After this was all done, I
just had to export the file and save everything, overall, I’m really happy with
how things went but I do wish I had more understanding of the sound side of
things, I also wish I had more time to improve the whole video.
