Evaluation

For this assignment, We were asked to create anything we liked as long as it well within our skills and was not seen as rude or explicit, for my FMP, I decided that I would like to do a full animation with both sounds and voice acting; something that would be a tough experience but would eventually pay off once the animation is completed.

I started the project by going through the research of multiple animations and how they were made and a rough explanation on the history of animation itself. This gave me a rough understanding of how animation works and the many different types of animation. After this, it was then onto the animation itself. It was a long and hard process, and my decision to commit to the drawn animation definitely brought up a lot of issues i.e. the amount of the slides required would cause a lot of frame rate issues and would occasionally crash the program. Other than that, the animation was fairly easy to create, it was straight forward and just required a lot of time and that was the main issue with the whole process, it does take a massive amount of time and can cut down on work. Every small movement had to be placed into its own frame and this was done for every scene and every small movement including those in the background, it took time and it did require being very careful as any mistake could end up looking incredibly obvious. Afterwards, I then inserted multiple sounds and effects to give the animation that much more of an impact, it was tough and putting the sound together so that they overlaid properly just felt like it was more trial and error than actual skill as just a small difference could end up really obvious when added to animation, however it was really interesting to create multiple sounds and ambience to really add that depth to the world and give the characters a real sense of personality.

Overall, I was really happy with the assignment, it felt like it was a real test of my skills and abilities, however, I would recommend that if you wish to use drawn animation on this level, keep it short as it the whole process can be incredibly demanding on time and this can really eat into the whole process, but I do believe that if I had more time, I would definitely dedicate myself to creating a much longer animation with far more detail to sound design and colour as I felt that, as artistic as the animation was meant to be, a little more colour could really add another level of depth that was just lacking in my original piece.

I also felt that the amount of time and the lack of understanding in the medium of sound really took so I could only add in a couple of seconds of sound, I really wish that this is something I could improve and that I had more time on as the whole class was really let down by the progression of sound design.