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georgesmithunit1 · 6 years

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Final Evaluation

25/06/18

In this evaluation I will be sharing my thoughts and opinions on my final animation as well as the process I went through to create my concepts and illustrations.

Concepts & Illustration Process

The assignment brief required me to create an animation that simulates a point and click game. I had complete creative control over the concept. I needed to create a minimum of one animated character, a digitally hand drawn background, elements of the background that are animated, and the whole sequence was to be a minimum of 10 seconds in length.

I adhered to all of those points except for one, which I completely forgot about - which was to have an element of the background moving, to be fair, I had planned on it only being minor in the first place (the rotating ventilation thing in the first scene). I came up with the idea of making a fighting-orientated scene for my animation, because I really just wanted to test out some animation techniques that I’d learned before, and also because I thought that it would be fun to animate, as well as entertain the audience. I wasn’t particularly inspired by anything to create a fighting scene, I’d wanted to do an animation like that for a while, so I thought it a perfect time to demonstrate what I could do. I had a lot of planning to do before I even created my background scenes. First of all, I needed to conduct some thorough research on point and click games, as well as anything else that seemed appropriate. I researched a number of intriguing titles which caught my eye when I first saw them, as well ones that I’d already heard of, and even played in one case. Researching those titles was really insightful and helped me with coming up with a solid visual style for my animation. After the research, I was required to come up with an entire 300 word plot for my animation - of course, this didn’t impact the animation itself, but it did help throughout the project as a whole, as it gave me a better understanding of my own story.

After finishing the plot, I needed to establish a clear visual style for my animation. I had already established one before getting to this point to be honest - and that was thanks to a game by the name of ‘Night in the Woods’. Luckily, I stumbled upon this game while I was researching point and click titles, and was immediately captivated, and even more so after I researched it further. I will share my thoughts on this game a little later on in this evaluation. Anyway, After I’d finished establishing my visual style, which would take inspiration from Night in the Woods, I needed to write about my main character complete with his very own backstory. This was similar to the plot in which it didn’t impact the animation at all, but did help me to get a better understanding of him and add some character depth. After all of this written stuff followed a series of pages in my sketchbook devoted to sketching out ideas of a character design, which adhered to my character description, as well as some sketches of the main enemy of the fight scene. Among these sketches was a character turnaround sheet, which would essentially showcase my main character’s appearance, whose name is Ace by the way, so I’ll refer to him as that from now on. The character turnaround sheet was pretty useful I think, as it helped serve as a reference for whenever I needed to draw Ace. Finally, I sketched out some initial ideas for a background scene for my animation, which mainly included cyberpunk cities etc. There was a lot of planning, which I believe was very necessary.

Now back to my main character, Ace. He is a very important character to the overall plot of the story, and so I wanted him to look intimidating, powerful, I wanted him to have a strong presence, so that’s why his colour palette ranges simply from white to black - I thought it best to have him wear a trench coat type of thing, because I wanted him to look professional and serious, so I thought this attire conveyed that perfectly. In that sense, I think Ace successfully communicates my intentions of having a strong-willed, physically strong and intimidating character. As for the style, I went with the anime/manga style while I was drawing him, since that’s pretty much all I can do somewhat decently, though I’m completely fine with that. It kind of translated over to the animation, though his design had to be dramatically compromised, since it would’ve taken so long if I’d have animated him exactly according to his illustrations, and maybe I wouldn’t even be done with the animation by now if I had been doing that, since I only finished it on 23/06/18, so a few days ago, at the time of writing.

Back to the backgrounds again. First of all, I mentioned earlier that my main inspiration for my background came from ‘Night in the Woods’. I really liked the visual aesthetics of that game, the graphics were really pleasing to look at in my opinion. They look as though they were all created in either Illustrator or Photoshop and given effects and textures according to the scene. I think that aspects of Night in the Woods are visible in my first scene, but definitely not in the final scene of my animation, since there’s a lot of details and effects that I used. For my scenes/backgrounds, I chose to use Photoshop alone, no Illustrator or scanning in drawings, since I believed that Photoshop was the best option for creating these scenes, and I still stand by that, as it offers many effects and is much more versatile in my opinion, I do end up using Illustrator later on however, since I needed to create two assets for my scene, which was the green arrow which appears at the end of the animation to tell the player that the character can move on, and the mouse cursor which was very important and a good detail in my opinion, as it makes it look like an actual point and click game. Of course, Illustrator is far superior to Photoshop when you need to create complex shapes which can’t be made in Photoshop in a short amount of time however. I also used Adobe After Effects to animate my ‘Start Game’ scene, as the background was created entirely in Photoshop and could only be animated in After Effects, given what I had planned to do. Back to my scenes, I chose to create them in a somewhat simple visual style as I knew that my animated characters would be excessively simple, and turns out I was right. I do think that all three scenes that I created all adhere to the same general theme of being futuristic and cyberpunk, and certainly communicate my intentions and the atmosphere of my animation.

Personal Analysis of my Final Animation

So my initial intention for my animation was to do a fighting scene, which I actually ended up with. While I was animating, I was essentially improvising what would come next, as for some reason, I never actually planned out the whole thing using a storyboard. I intended for my animation to be entertaining, whilst still trying to adhere to the project name, a point and click game. Actually, now that I think about it, I had a second idea kept in my head during the very early stages of this project, which would take more of an adventurous route, which I thought somewhere down the line afterwards wouldn’t be as fun to animate. I don’t think that counts as my final animation changing in the end, since I didn’t choose it to begin with, so if anything, it changed during the early phase, before planning. I think that my idea of creating a fight scene was kind of ambitious, but I didn’t want to go over the top in terms of concepts, so I had to limit my imagination a little there, but as I go on, and learn more and more, I’ll hopefully become more versatile in my skill set, and be able to create very ambitious animations, with camera movement etc. In terms of software knowledge, I had a lot of experience in using Photoshop, since I’d been using it a while ago, and I’d had the opportunity to learn it even more this past year, so I wasn’t limited in my background creation. In Adobe Animate, I was less knowledgeable, however, I’ve actually been animating for the past 7 or so years, on and off of course, on a software called Flipnote Hatena, which was on my Nintendo DSi, so I had learned some basic animation techniques which I developed from experimenting over on that, like smearing, it’s a technique that can be seen in my animation quite a lot - maybe I used it a bit too much, but anyway, it’s when you draw a kind of lazy-looking frame between other frames, to simulate the character or object moving quickly. I may find a way to share some of those animations at some point, I have some good ones on there. Anyway, my point is that moving from that software to Adobe Animate wasn’t too difficult a transition, especially since I’d used it in secondary school before, so I was able to adapt to it with relative ease.

Throughout this project, I haven’t particularly learned any groundbreaking new techniques or anything, though I have absolutely had the chance to develop my already existing techniques and skills. It also helped give me experience with combining different scenes together, and then animating them when they were all together, for example, it was tricky at first when I wanted to combine all of these different scenes, but, after a bit of trial and error, I manged to get them together and start animating the mouse cursor, since it was much easier to do this in After Effects. Along with this, I also used the trial and error method when it came to exporting my final finished animation from After Effects, since that was the last software that I used, which held all of my scenes together, as well as the mouse cursor movement and the green arrow at the end. I remember vividly that I ended up having to export it at least 15 times, since I had to keep messing with the quality to try and get the best that I could. I ended up getting a sub par quality when I rendered and exported at home, and then somehow, when I tried it at school, I ended up with a better quality version, which I have uploaded to YouTube. The quality isn’t the greatest and there are black bars on the left and right sides, but it will have to do at this point. I did look up a few tutorials online, but none yielded any success.

When it comes to my animation, while I’m pleased with the result, I actually believe that it doesn’t look a whole lot like a game, which is a shame, considering the amount of time that I poured into it. I think that the main problem or reason for this is that it looks too fluid perhaps, and also it just looks more like an actual animation, since the movement is so fast - I think that the mouse cursor which I implemented during the After Effects phase as well the start game screen sort of saved the whole thing from looking completely like just a cell animation. I do have an idea of what could be improved to make my animation look more like a game actually, and I’m a little annoyed that I didn’t think of this throughout the entirety of the animation process. What I’m thinking is that when the characters stop, they could kind of bounce up an down, I think that’s called an idle animation or something - it wouldn’t have been such a difficult task to do as well, so it’s a shame I didn’t think to do it. It could’ve also drawn out the animation a little longer maybe. I think that the smear frames that I mentioned earlier definitely don’t help the animation in terms of it looking like a game, though I saw no better alternative for fast movement, since it would look choppy and weird when a character moves from one side to the other if those were the only frames. If I had all the time in the world, I would’ve increased the FPS to something high, but I didn’t so I stuck with the option that I believed was best.

I think that I did a somewhat decent job at getting it to look like a game in the end. Though when it comes to time management, I started off terribly. When I started animating in Adobe Animate, the FPS count was set at 24. So me doing a completely frame by frame animation, I was drawing out these entire characters every single frame and it was taking me so long - I was getting incredibly frustrated at times, and considered completely scrapping the idea of doing a frame by frame animation. This lasted almost two weeks, with me barely getting anything done, and I was beginning to panic, since the deadline was fast approaching, and I had only done just under two seconds total. I had the idea to create a ‘Start Game’ scene, which could be considered a cop out, though I needed it if I wanted to get even close to the 10 second minimum, or so I thought. I made sure to make this screen look good visually, and so I began animating it after I’d finished creating it in Photoshop. I even added a mouse cursor that would click on a button to start the game - I managed to draw this one out to three whole seconds. I was pleased with it but I realised that I needed to go back to the dreaded 24 FPS animation.

One afternoon when I was working on it at home however, I randomly decided to look at the right hand side of the Adobe Animate document, and saw the FPS button, I decided to mess around with it and move it up and down, and when I played it at 18 FPS, I noticed that the number of keyframes in each second decreased, and the length of my animation so far was now at 4 seconds. So I played the animation that I had so far, and it actually looked better than when it was at 24 FPS, since that was way too fast for what I was doing. I decided to move the FPS down even further, and stopped at 15 FPS after playing it a few times, and realising that this speed looked so much better, the animation was longer, at about five and a half seconds. I was very happy with this turn of events, and became motivated to finish it again. I understand this was kind of unrelated from the start of this paragraph, but I just wanted to explain that as I felt it was rather important to the whole project.

Personal Opinions on my Performance & Final Work

Overall, I am very satisfied with my animation. I believe that the time and effort that I put into it payed off, though it still has its strengths and glaring weaknesses throughout.

First of all, I think that unfortunately, the negative aspects outweigh the strengths, though I think the animation kind of carries the positive aspects. Anyway, speaking of the animation, I tried to get the entirety of it as fluid and smooth as I possibly could, which may actually be considered a weakness, since that is probably one of the main reasons for it not looking like a game. But set that aside, and I think that it is one of the main good things about the animation, alongside the added effects that I added post Adobe Animate (the green arrow and the mouse cursor), since these two aspects help drastically make the animation look more game-like in my opinion. Back to the animation, I’m very pleased with how I animated the electricity emanating from the enemy, and especially when he is charging an electricity beam, and I think that it is instantly recognisable as electricity, which is definitely a good thing (then again, what else would it possibly be). The backgrounds are also a major plus of the whole thing, I think that they’re all well-made, except maybe the scene where they’re in the sky, it looks a bit strange. Though the first two scenes definitely correspond with each other, and actually look like they’re from the same thing.

As for the negative aspects of the final animation, the weaknesses, are quite prominent in their numbers, though I think as I mentioned before, the animation definitely cancels them out a bit. Anyway, one of the first negatives to take away would be the the characters in comparison to the background. They don’t really correspond to each other and look out of place, although then again, there are a lot of types of animation out there that utilise real backgrounds and then have 2-dimensional characters moving around on them. An example of this that I remember watching at one point would be Aug(De)Mented Reality, which uses real life scenarios with 2-dimensional traditional animation cels. Another example would be anime (or sometimes western animations) - they draw these often very detailed backgrounds because nothing will be interacting with them, so they can just keep them static, but go all out with the detail. A specific example would be the animated movie Your Name, which does has some animated aspects, though my point is that the background is incredibly detailed compared to the main characters (and all characters for that matter). Back to things looking out of place, the green arrow at the end definitely looks strange, no matter how you look at it, since this time it doesn’t just look weird with the background, it looks weird with the animated characters too, I don’t really see a way around it to be honest, except maybe change the colour or even hand draw the arrow in adobe animate. Something I want to point out is Ace and his attire, namely, his trench coat, which I seemed to have subconsciously changed into a cape somewhere along the lines. Finally, the last thing I want to mention is the movement and speed of actions. Essentially, while animating the mouse cursor over in After Effects, I realised I didn’t have a whole lot of time for the mouse to stop at some parts, namely, near the end of the first scene. I just think that there needed to be more pause between actions to allow for more mouse movement to be a little slower, and those idle animations I mentioned would help with this greatly.

There are a handful of things that I would do differently if I were to redo the entire project, including a couple that would have been really beneficial to me. For starters, I’ll go back to the character movement again, I really think that it’s too fast paced, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you can do a fight scene well, which I did, but I think it lacked different camera angles and movement etc. So I believe that when a character is finished performing an action, they should just pause for a bit, so that 1: I can have slower mouse movement, and 2: it won’t look solely like an animation, as opposed to a game, which is what the objective was. The other very important thing that I didn’t do for some reason, would be to create a story board, because I was improvising throughout the entire thing, and if I just drew out a few pages worth of boxes, it could’ve been a lot more structured, and I may have finished the animation a lot sooner, because I knew what I was doing. Also, this probably goes without saying, but I would have started at a much lower FPS than 24 when I started out the animation, since 24 is just way too many for a simple point and click game.

But overall though, I am pleased with my final animation and I do think that I was successful in creating an animation which adhered to the project name, and I think I managed my time fairly well, more so in the second half of the project, where I was on a roll with creating the final scene and animating once I’d figured out that I didn’t need to animate at 24 FPS. There were things that I did to speed up the process though, like with Ace’s character - he’s literally transparent, which is a decision that I decided on during the early stages of animating the first scene. He was too detailed a character, since he has different segments (clothes) unlike the enemy, which I just coloured one solid colour, along with the eye. Also, I just didn’t want to deal with the fill tool, which I had to deal with enough when I was colouring in the enemy - I kept trying to fill him in, only to find out that there were still like two or three gaps in the lines, so it wouldn’t fill. Another thing I did was near the end of the animation, I started copy and pasting frames and moving them a little bit instead of hand drawing all of the frames, which is something I should’ve done since the start, but still hand drawn the necessary frames. It saved a lot of time.

I really didn’t plan on writing 3703 words for this, I think it’s the most I’ve ever written. I guess I just had a lot to talk about.

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