Development Process

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.