Moving Pictures: Final Animations

Below are the links to my final animations; my three stings advertising William Shakespeare's play; A Midsummer Night's Dream.



X2 from Alice Dear on Vimeo.


X3 from Alice Dear on Vimeo.


X4 1 from Alice Dear on Vimeo.

If I were to create my animation again, I would make sure that I kept the title frames and the rest of the animation succinct in media as this led there to be some inconsistency within the stings; stopping it from flowing so easily. This happened because I ran into time limits when colouring in my frames for my animation after I had already collaged the six frames I was using for the background to my title text. I could also have overcome this problem of inconsistency by putting the collaged backgrounds faintly throughout the rest of my animation sequence. However because I decided to use pencil for the rest of my animation due to time restraints, my work wasn’t as bold and clear cut as I wanted it to be. I thought it was important to use colour in these pieces to capture the passion in the plays between the characters and their constantly changing emotions. Using black and white however may have been the better option as this would have made my work a lot quicker and easier whilst still looking clean cut and would have perhaps fitted together more professionally.

Overall creating these animations really gave me a huge insight into the work that goes into creating stop frame animation, yet it also opened my eyes to the effects and tools you can use to save time and to create a more professional finished product. In future I will be able to think about these elements while I am planning my project so I can incorporate digital with hand drawn in a much more effective way.

After Effects

I found learning how to use After Effects really useful for this project and for future animated projects as the tools this program has available can save you a lot of time and help to create a much more professional final animation. I think being able to add music using this program really helped to bring some more energy and life into my stings. It also added to the atmosphere of the work especially as the chosen music’s lyrics and instrumentals corresponded to the themes within the play itself.

Dragon Frame

Dragon frame was a great tool to use to achieve high resolution, ordered images for my animation. Learning how to use it was easy as once it was set up and the settings for the resolution etc. were sorted, actually taking the photographs of the image sequence was really simple.  I really wish that I had attempted to do a continual drawing using this software as I think this may have worked better as a faster way of creating the images I made. I also think this would have been a more effective way of creating the title sequence and would have probably fitted in a lot better with the rest of the sequence this way. I don’t think the way I have used digital text and drawn animation works very well so in future projects the process and production of all parts will need to be considered very carefully.

I am really happy that I managed to fulfill the brief and complete the 3 animated stings. It was extremely time consuming and it was quite hard to stay focused as I was doing frame after frame with only slight differences between them. However I absolutely love how you can create metamorphosis in your illustrations with animation. I loved creating patterns that turned into clasped hands, which then opened and turned back into patterns; creating moons that turned into a drop of colour, faces that were created from a line and then bought to life and blink. It was so fun to see the final result even if it was not exactly how I wanted it media wise! Animation is something I will continue to keep in mind and I think I can overcome some of the obstacles I found in this project by making less parts move at once or by using dragon frame to take stop frames whilst actually drawing the animation instead of lots of separate sheets of paper.

I wish that the metallic media I used had reflected the light in a slightly different way so that it produced a dark tinted silver/gold. This definitely has to do with lighting so in future this will be an aspect I will have at the front of my mind when setting up Dragonframe to capture my frames in the correct form. This would have made my animations a lot clearer, particularly in the fairy animation. I would also have liked to have created the animations in paint; however I am unsure how long this would have actually taken! This project has been a massive eye opener on how long a 12 frame per second stop frame animation can actually take to produce! Perhaps if I had used the intended media straight away when drawing it using the light box I may have been able to finish it in a clearer media. I instead used pencil to first draw the frames... however I then ran out of time to colour in the frames fully.

Due to these time restraints I decided to just use a few key colours throughout my animations. I think these worked okay but I am not happy with this aspect of my final resolutions. I think I really pushed myself to ensure all frames were coloured though so I am proud of my dedication and commitment to this even if it did not turn out as I had intended!

If I were to do another animation, (which I definitely will once I have recovered from drawing that many frames!) I will consider After Effects as a much bigger part. After speaking to my tutor Eleanor I realised how time saving this program could be, particularly on bringing layers together and just using 6 or so frames for a consistent moving background. Unfortunately I had already created the majority of my frames by this point however I did keep this in mind when creating my moving sky background to my text which consisted of only 6 frames and I think worked really effectively as a simple back drop.