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About my Flour Sack Animation

I feel like I really challenged myself with this animation. I have never even attempted an animation before this year and I have learnt alot in a short space of time. Overall I am very pleased with what I acheived. I decided to make my animation on flash as we will be using it in the future and I wanted to get some practice with the method we would be using in class. I also chose flash however, because in my planning I had decided to do an animation that was comprised of flat colours which I thought flash would be better at rendering than Photoshop, which is an artier program. Thirdly, I chose Flash as I felt it would save me time with my background where I wanted an army of capable, umbrella wielding sacks to contrast with my main character sack. I thought both movie clips and motion tween's would be useful here, and they are both unavailable on Photoshop.

Things I think I have done well.

I think my smoothest animation is on my background sacks, probably because I only had to draw one of them so I could spend more time on each frame. This was not possible on foreground sack due to time constraints. But yea, I really like the feet especially on the background sacks, I think they are drawn and posed really well.

I think my choice of content is good, if I do say so myself. I am very happy with it as it was nothing like the plan I had originally of my sack falling in love with an inanimate sack and trying to impress her/it. I had to change this original story as I felt the scene I had planned would take WAY too long and in removing some of the build up scenes I felt alot of, build up of empathy would be removed for the sack due to lack of build up/content. One of the scenes in this original idea though was my flour sack fetching an umbrella to shield the inanimate sack because it had started to rain. I really liked this idea and thought it was sweet so it was that I then decided to build on, rather than the romance story.

I think my choice of content has allowed me the freedom to develop my sacks character in a really simplistic way.

 I think the fact I have managed to compete 20 seconds of animation is a feat in itself as I have really struggled when trying to learn how to use flash as its really complicated for someone who has never tried such a thing before and drawing out every single frame was so challenging as it is hard to keep the size of the sack consistent - especially with my animation as he often walks in diagonals away from the camera, so perspective is a concern and I think i have managed with that really well. Keeping drawing quality consistent during hours of drawing is also really difficult so I'm glad my style seems consistent throughout. 

I am actually quite pleased with the style. I think it could be better as I think my drawing skills are better than what you can see here. But as a first attempt at drawing each frame individually I am happy it looks clean and relatively tidy. My lines don't look scrappy at least!

I think my use of squash and stretch is quite good in the walk and also when he pulls the umbrella and jumps at the end.

I think the umbrella made a great and very engaging secondary action as it gave the sack something to interact with as he was moving, adding interest.

Where I think I could improve in the future.

I don't think my timing is brilliant. Especially when the sack pauses (I don't think he pauses long enough) and when he is breathing on the floor, that looks to fast. I think when he gets up, that also seems too fast. When he falls down in attempting to get up, I feel like he should stay on the floor longer before trying to get up again.

I think by drawing in feet, rather than using the corners of the sack as feet made it harder for me. It would have been easier to do lumps as feet so when he was walking i only have to focus on placing of the feet, rather than of shape as well. Because I did the feet this way I think sometimes he looks like he isn't. putting enough weight on them. Especially as he walks. In my first sketchy layer. I actually did the feet as lumps rather than as actual feet and I felt this was a mistake as I think the feet looked more weighted in the sketch than in the final animation. I should have drawn the feet as they are in the sketch or continued the lumpy feet into the final animation.

I think the rain could have been faded in slower. I did use drawing of less rain building up into more rain but I felt the build up could have lasted longer as I think the heavy rain starts too quickly after the single drop.

I think the animation could be smoother. It doesn't look "realistic" like a professional animation. I think this is probably due to the lack of frames I had to work with and the fact my drawing wasn't GREAT. but the lines aren't consistent, giving the sack a wiggly quality.

The umbrella isn't entirely physically accurate when its blowing about and doesn't blow in the same direction as the rain which is a bit unrealistic. But I did this as I needed the umbrella to be in a particular position when the sack went to pick it up. So i tried to make it look as windy, but also relatively believable whilst still landing it where I needed it to land. 

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About my Pendulum Animation

This is improved from my original animation. The pendulum now has move of a pause at the end of its swing which makes the pendulum seem as if it has more weight. I'd uploading here but for some reason the gif file keeps error-ing, don't know why (so see zip file)

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About my animatics

Version 1: Animatic on 2's

Version 2: Animatic trying a camera zoom on roll. Tried it as a variation in staging, but I felt like it was stuck in just for the sack of it. I dint feel like there was really any reason for the camera zoom so I felt it looked out of place

Version 3: The roll is on 1's where as the rest is on 2's to speed the roll up. I like the speeding up of the roll as it will give a variation of speed in the animation. This gives a contrast in timing making it more realistic, as gravity is acting more on the fall than the rest of the animation due to the lack of opposing force given by the sack it would be faster. 

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Will just have to...

...Zip my Animatics on blackboard and have them viewable there as SWF files because I cant upload SWF files to tumblr, tumblr doesnt support them and I cant find a converter that will convert them to MP4 without speeding them up or only making a limited amount of it viewable. 

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