A majority of my research was actually experimental research and actually testing out things to see if they would work well in my animation. 

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I relied on doing experimental research because that is how I work best as I can make a better judgement of how I want to do something if I have hands on experience with trying something out and seeing if it will work.

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I thought that I should rely on my strengths and if I researched in a way that I was comfortable with then I would be able to know how I wanted to start doing my animation.

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I originally had the idea of doing stop frame animation but after actually doing some I realised that it would take far too long to actually complete a finished looking animation and I would have to rush the animation to finish it entirely or just not finish it and neither of the outcomes seemed very appealing to me. So by doing this research and seeing if it was reasonable to do stop frame animation this is what allowed me to deduce that I would be much better off doing computer animation.

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This method of animation would allow me to create a more finished and more polished product and something that I would actually be proud of as well which is what I want to achieve at the end of the course.

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I have also done a moderate amount of concept sketches and a few rough storyboards to just see if I would be able to replicate my drawings on a computer and to see if they would work well within the context of my animation. 

I want to create something sort of unsettling and I wasn't sure if I wasn't sure if drawing something unsettling would be within my ability.

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I have done quite a few concept sketches because I want to have a clear idea of what I actually want to draw and know exactly what style I want to go for in my animation.

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However by testing out these drawings on Adobe Animate I figured out that I can overlap the lines that I have drawn and that helps give the animation a more messy feel which in turn makes the animation more unsettling in my opinion.

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Moreover, considering I'm not the greatest at drawing I found a function on Adobe Animate called "Smoothing" which makes the lines that you draw automatically more smooth and by exploiting this I can make a mediocre drawing actually look nice as the program sort of creates the lines for me even if I don't draw them correctly the smoothing function resolves the problem for me.

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Concerning the rough storyboards that I have drawn I definitely need to improve on making them clearer so other people and peers have an idea of what I want to make and the direction I want to create and they could more easily give their input of how I could do something. By having a lacklustre storyboard I am inhibiting their ability to do this.

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The reason my storyboards are not very good is because I have never had to rely on them before so I have gotten used to doing things as I go and implementing ideas as I go. However in this project I realise that this could be a detriment as I may change my idea of putting something in spontaneously and regret it later on.

By having a good storyboard this could stop me from going off track and give me a more clear cut idea of what I want to do.

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A storyboard will also help to make the animation less unintentionally confusing as my scenes will be clearly recorded down so I won't put something in that has little relevance to what i'm doing currently.

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Furthermore I have had confirmation from "JaidenAnimations" via email that story boarding greatly helps her as she says that there is a lot of story boarding involved before she starts her animations.

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Saying this; I do have a couple of storyboards and I know what I want to do and I think by making them slightly basic this could give more creative freedom to change around the ideas and scenes in the animation if I suddenly get a burst of inspiration.

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Moreover, before I started actually doing the animation of "Fraser" I did some practice animations of the beginning of the animation. I did this because I wanted to test out whether my idea for a beginning was actually good.

The first iteration of the opening I actually did on ToonBoom Harmony, I only animated the eyes and the head because I wasn't too confident at using the program, however I found out that I actually dislike using ToonBoom Harmony and I wouldn't want to do a whole animation on it. This is because I think that it lacks a smoothing feature and you're unable to copy the frames which is something that I really rely on when doing my animation.

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The second iteration of the opening of the animation I had to rush but the result have me confidence that I would be able to create a good product if I continued on doing my animation in a similar style to that second iteration.  I did this animation on Adobe Animate and it was a lot less time consuming than ToonBoom as you are able to copy the frames and the smoothing tool is present so it assisted me in actually drawing.

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Overall, my experimental research is what really helped me in making my choice for how I wanted to animate and helped me in deciding what to actually do in the animation and how to implement my primary research and secondary research elements into my final animation.