This is the production evidence of our 20 sec animation, each page or image with a name next to it means this page or image is the work done by that specific teamate. While I download this document some of my teamates might yet to put everything they done on it but I have put all the evidence I found necessary to represent my working process on it.
For this project I have experienced and learned to manage a team of four, the cooperation was successful overall as we are able to distribute the role according to each one’s advantage. I found that producing a scheduled timetable useful as even if our team was unable to stick with it completely it still provided an overall image of our process and speed. The main reasons for fail to follow the schedule is that members have unexpected vacations that was not in the consideration and underestimated the difficulty of some task. For improvement I think it would be ideal to make the task more specific and separate a big task in smaller semi-tasks to make the progress clearer and easier to track. Meanwhile set up a weekly or so to check how other teammates are doing. Communication was overall smooth, yet transferring documents is relatively troublesome, for improvement it is necessary to regulate the format of the files and their naming to organise them better.
For this project I am mainly responsible for part of character and environmental concept designing, storyboard production, rough animatic making and animating. For the storyboard, I found the camera angles are too consistent which do make the story clearer but also less interesting. Due to lack in experience of animation production and teamworking, our working order is not ideal, I believe backgrounds shall be made in advance to make sure the colouring is made according to it, so the overall animation is in uniformity. As different animators have different styles, this animation’s style sometimes changes which have the potential to distract audience. Overall, in animation wise I have further developed my animation skill through designing a more complicate character with soft cloth and more details, which allowed me to study and get experience from animating the cloth. Animating water and scenes in my dynamic angles has also been experimented and the experience I gained from this can be used in future animation as well. However, when making the animation I have not refined the line making colouring process later harder, so next time I would make sure the line is more refined, exact and closed. I have also found a better approach to animate characters more efficiently to save time. Because of the time restriction many actions are rushed so had I have more time tolerance for future animation I would aim to make the action more completed and to have more still frames to give a rest to the audiences.
As I am the one who is responsible for the story concept this process was very challenging, as we wanted tell a story that is interesting, narrative and short enough to be fitted in 20 second, for this reason the concepts have been altered drastically for many times. For me I am more used of animation with duration to 5-7 mins which did affect my ability to come up with a suitable story concept for this project thus I do admit that the story for the animation is not very ideal. The 20 sec is clearly too short to introduce a new world setting to the audiences and to tell a story with a deep meaning, so in the future I will make story with such duration much simpler and straightforward. We tried to put some symbolism and metaphor in our story to make the animation fit in the time, yet we later discovered such method would add on the difficulty for audiences to understand the story, so I need to find a better way to express the story in the future. The concept design of the character is aesthetically pleasing, yet the detail and the clothes on her made the animation more difficult which contributed to the delay in progress, yet I do think such challenge is necessary as design shall not always be sacrificed for simplicity of animating. Therefore, in the future I would try to find a good balance between the aesthetic and simplicity.
Overall, I have developed more skills for character animation and Aftereffect through making more dynamic shots and complex movement which I have not done before. I have also developed a deeper understanding on how to manage a team to make animation together and the time each stage normally takes. The main improvement I shall make in the future is to study what type of the story is more suitable for a very short duration and how to show the story in the most simplified and straight forward way alongside with visual aesthetic