Overall, I am very happy and proud of what I made as a final animation. This is because I am actually created a finished animation that for me went over all of the criteria that I wanted to include.
From the very beginning of the project, I knew that I wanted to create something unsettling/disturbing. Even though I was unsure of how I was going to go about this.
I wanted to make something unsettling/out of the box because something unorthodox usually leaves a longer lasting impact on viewers.
I wanted this to be the outcome of my animation because if I make an animation that sticks with the viewer my animation will be remembered by people which will give me a better chance at achieving a higher grade, this is because if I made something that isn't very memorable won't have as much of a chance at achieving a higher grade than something that is memorable.
Moreover, I wanted to create an animation that would leave the viewer thinking. I wanted to do this because I don't just want my animation something to be viewed. I want it to leave the audience with questions, such as "What actually happened to Fraser" or just leave them wanting to find out more about Fraser.
This will again make my animation more memorable as the viewer will want to see more. This also gives me options for the future of Fraser. It opens up options for perhaps some sequels of Fraser. I'm thinking about maybe turning Fraser into a series. Sort of like David Firth's series "Salad Fingers" in a way where I go down a more disturbing route that makes the audience think and leaves them with open ended questions.
The ending of the " Salad Fingers" series is very ambiguous and leaves the viewers with a lot of questions that aren't answered and they are the one's that can interpret the story however they see fit and that is the direction I want to take my animation of "Fraser" in.
Concerning my chosen theme of "Mental Corrosion/erosion." I chose this theme because from the beginning I wanted to pursue a darker theme, this is because I feel like I can make a better animation if I choose a theme that I feel that I can be more inventive with; and these themes usually are more on the darker side . I also chose the theme of mental corrosion because it is not a theme that is very commonly implemented into animations and media from my experience with watching videos and playing games. This would mean that it would be a bit of a challenge to try and implement the theme into my animation.
This is because there isn't a plethora of information/knowledge on mental corrosion in animations. The main thing I used for research on my chosen theme was actually talking to my step-mum. This is because my step-mum is a trained mental health nurse and she used to work with young people specifically. This was really useful for me because teenagers and young people are my target audience. So by talking with her I learnt about how a young person that suffers with mental/emotional problems mind works and I have tried to incorporate these elements into my animation.
The things that she taught me was that common problems teenagers and young people face usually revolve around a feeling of being trapped and that they can't escape from their life at a current point in time. Moreover she told me that things the teenagers she worked with would usually mention them feeling lonely and that they feel as if they are alone in facing all of their problems.
This was useful for me because after learning this I wanted to incorporate an oppressive atmosphere to my animation to create a sense of being alone and make the animation feel claustrophobic. This would help symbolise a feeling of being on your lonesome or being lonely. However I don't know how well this would help me incorporate my theme of mental corrosion into my animation. I am worried that I have delved too deep into just debilitating mental conditions and not the specific sense of someone's sanity or mental state eroding.
Concerning the actual implementation of my theme of mental erosion/corrosion I think I could have done this a lot better. This is because when watching my animation back, it is actually not very clear what my theme is, my theme mostly comes across as darkness or just an unnerving atmosphere and I don't have a theme really at all. It is possible to notice that I have made an attempt at showing the mental state of Fraser deteriorating by having the imagery I show seem to be nonsensical and not really connected.
I have used dream logic to try and symbolise that the animation is actually exploring Fraser's inner most thoughts and emotions. This could make it seem that the theme of my animation is dreams or memories and not corrosion. To remedy this I could have made the imagery I show more explicitly something to do with mental erosion and making the images and scenes I show more linked together so there is a more coherent story so the theme is more easily picked out from the animation.
However, I have made the scenes I show in Fraser quite disjointed and this is because this first iteration of Fraser is almost going to act as a trailer for more Fraser animations. I want to make more animations of Fraser where I will actually make a coherent story that people can follow reasonably easily. In all future animations I may make I want to keep the original Fraser feel where it is unnerving but it tells a story. Reminiscent of Salad Fingers but not entirely the same.
Moving on to the research that I have done. I believe that from the first and even second projects this year I have improved extensively in doing the research itself and the actual utilization of the research and how I can fit the research I have done into my animation. The strongest type of animation that I have done is definitely experimental research. Experimental research for me consisted of testing ideas and making concept art and testing out animation styles and seeing which aspects of the elements I have done would fit well into my animation.
Most of my experimental research was drawing a lot of concept art. I used these as a base to start making storyboards so I have a basic idea of the direction I want my animation to go in. However when it came to the storyboards that I drew. These could very much have been improved. This is because when it came to my storyboards they were very low quality and I didn't take much care into actually making them. I believe this is because I still don't fully believe that extensive story boarding or preparation of actually starting a project helps me too much. I am aware that this isn't right and that planning what you want to do, especially storyboards as these help you actually start a project.
Moreover, the test animations that I have done actually worked quite well and let me know that I was going in the right direction with my animation. The test animations I did consisted of a simplified version to the opening of my animation where you see the head of Fraser open his eyes and the head shakes. At this point in the process I wasn't actually sure what I was trying to do where the head shakes. I knew that I wanted to go for this sort of head shaking effect but I didn't know how to accomplish this. I started by having a lone going around the head every frame but this turned out to not actually look good however I was going in the right direction.
The way I advanced this was by drawing a head and then making an outline layer of the head on animate and drawing an outline of the head every frame. I did this because I wanted to make my animation somewhat purposely messy. This turned out to be a success as the outlines made the image look 3D and that the head was moving in an erratic way. Because I was very fond of this idea I adopted this 3D effect to the rest of my animation. This gave my animation a unique style/look which again will make my animation more memorable as the style of it is distinctive.
However, if I story boarded to a higher quality I would have maybe known beforehand to try and create a messy style, this is because the messy style was an idea I had in the moment and I wasn't sure if it was going to work, I experimented with it and it turned out to be an asset to my animation, however I would've saved time in doing this if I knew to do this beforehand.
In terms of Primary Research, it wasn't the best; this is because I didn't really know how to do or what really Primary Research was at the time of trying to it. In retrospect this is something that I should have figured out as doing primary research would've helped me in completing my animation however I lacked the initiative to actually go out and find out how to do Primary Research so this is something that I know I have to do for future projects.
The primary research I did do however was not of the best standard as well. It mainly consisted of getting feedback on my animation and how they think I could change certain parts of it. This ended up being useful information for me to have. This was because when making my animation; I want to make something that I am proud of and enjoy but also something that a viewer would enjoy and how they would change things to make the whole experience enjoyable for them. I am aware that I'm unable to please everyone and cater to what everyone likes at the same time so by getting lots of different opinions from different people this helped me to distinguish what to change that would help make the animation better for the most people.
However a lot of the comments that I got were rather positive and the comments that they made mostly consisted of changing simple things such as making the lighting less harsh or perhaps center the images more. Of course this feedback is appreciated and useful but perhaps I should have asked a wider range of people what they think or asked what people thought more as I was going along not after I had finished a section as this would have given me more of a chance to change and alter things that could improve my animation.
More Primary Research I have done was actually emailing a YouTuber known as "JaidenAnimations" and asking her about her important story boarding is for her. She did get back to me and say that there is a lot of story boarding involved; which gave me the confirmation I needed that I was lacking in my story boarding but I neglected in asking her if she actually had any tips for story boarding so I knew that I had to do more but I was unsure on how to make my storyboards useful.
Overall, I still need to make my primary research better and improve it. I could do this by actually researching how to do Primary Research, this will help me in actually making a better animation at the end of the project.
I also have done some secondary research for my animation. My secondary research mainly consisted of watching YouTube videos that I thought could help me in gathering ideas for my animation. These videos mainly consisted of other animations that people created which shared similar themes and aesthetics to my animation. Specific examples include David Firth's work "Salad Fingers" which is where I gathered most of my inspiration for my animation. This is because "Salad Fingers" explores and delves into lots of dark themes and has disturbing imagery which is the way I wanted my animation to be from the beginning so I thought that "Salad Fingers" would have been a good option to take some ideas from and change them into my own animation.
However, when it comes to Salad Fingers I mostly only borrowed from the actual animation aspects and the aesthetic of the animation and not the way in which the concepts/story are presented to the viewer. The way I borrowed the aesthetic was that I based the design of Fraser off of "Salad Fingers" and the messy animation style where the way things are drawn are purposely not perfect. I did this because to portray the dark concepts such as mental erosion and loneliness I think that I could portray these better if I used a disturbing art style. I also chose this style to emulate because I thought that this style would be something that I could feasibly do rather easily and not have to spend too much time on drawing the characters and I could spend more time on perfecting the smoothness and the actual animation itself.
Moreover, when it comes to the story elements that I wanted to incorporate in my animation these were mostly inspired by three specific videos Lovely Lauren's on YouTube "Hypnotic (Meme)" and "[初音ミク/Miku] - Love Love Nightmare (PV)" which is found on the channel Pomodoro². From these videos I chose specific segments to try and emulate in my animation but change them to fit into my animation easier. I chose these videos because they both have disturbing imagery that I feel that I could've draw easily and made the images shown fit into my animation. More so the second video mentioned. This is because in this video the art style would be easier for me to replicate and the images are not too complex and would be easy to change for my animation.
I have also watched a multitude of animations that are basic tutorials on the animate program and before I decided that I was going to do computer animation I actually watched some tutorials on stop frame animation and the basics of animation. I did this because before I started the animation I was actually wondering whether I should do stop frame animation or computer animation. This was because I wasn't confident in my drawing skills and I didn't have an extensive knowledge of the animation program so I thought that if I did stop frame I could get a better result. This was because I enjoy doing stop frame animation and I feel like I could get a better result by using physical apparatus and equipment for my animation.
However, after researching about stop frame and learning about how long it takes I decide against doing it and deciding to do computer animation. I might have not been very confident in it but if I learn how to use the program sooner I won't be as worried if I have to use it later on. Moreover, I would rather actually finish an animation than have an unfinished stop frame animation. It might look nicer being in stop frame but I would feel unfulfilled and unhappy if it was unfinished so I think that choosing to do computer animation was a good choice for me.
Furthermore, before I had started on my style for my animation I was considering doing rubber hose animation like a couple of my classmates. This is because if some other people were doing the same things as me they would be able to assist me and vice versa. I also chose this style because after researching I found out that rubber hose is actually very simple animation that mainly consists of drawing simple shapes and simple backgrounds. However downsides to this animation is that you have to be very meticulous in your approach to animating as rubber hose is normally animated in 1s which means you draw a different image each frame, and considering the frame rate is usually 24 frames per second this is a lot of work to get 1 second of animation.
This is why I opted away from doing rubber hose animation, the reasons being that if multiple people are doing rubber hose my animation will not stand out as much, moreover if I did rubber hose animation, this would've taken a much longer time than if I drew in my own animation style where I am not worried about every frame being perfect. I purposely want my animation to be messy as this will give character to the animation and I think if I did rubber hose animation I would spend too much time on animating the character than actually completing an animation.
Time management is really something I wanted to improve on when doing this animation so I think choosing options that lessen the amount of time that I'm actually animating. This gives me more time to perfect sections of the animation to my liking and create new sections to my animation.
Overall, in terms of research I think that I have improved greatly in mainly using the research for my own gain and incorporating what I've researched into my animation rather than just doing research because I'm told o. This time around I know how to gather information that is relevant to me and use it. This is important because doing this gave me somewhere to base my ideas off of so I wasn't stuck thinking about what to do. I knew where to start and alter it to my animation.
I still very much need to improve on my Primary Research and get more feedback on my animation from different people. This is because it is always useful to get multiple peoples' opinions and if I want to improve my animation I need to know what people think of it. I could also improve my Primary Research by doing surveys and collecting information about certain aspects of my animation. The only thing I'm worried about is that I don't know how relevant a survey will be for me. I worry that I might just ignore the information given and just use it as evidence for a grade that I could get.
In terms of context, I think that this was definitely the strongest aspect of my project. This is because all throughout my project, I was thinking about how the elements of my animation link together and how they all have an impact in the world of my animation that I was trying to create.
This was specifically evident in my research. Mostly my secondary and to a lesser extent my experimental. With every piece of research I did I remembered to link it back to my idea for my animation and if it was actually relevant for me to research. By having my context in the back of mind, this allowed me to sift through research and helped me save time.
However, considering the theme and ideas of my video are quite specific and not widely explored; this meant that finding research that I could utilize and implement the ideas from them in my animation was a difficult task. However when I did find relevant research I was very easily able to use parts of it in my animation. The research that I used was mostly music videos to different songs that explored dark concepts and had disturbing imagery.
Moreover, when we first started this project my initial idea was to actually do stop frame animation that portrayed disturbing concepts and themes. I thought about doing stop frame because I thought it would be easier for me to do, however after research I decided that computer animation would be easier to portray my theme of corrosion in and I would be able to more easily show disturbing images.
The original idea was to make something disturbing but I didn't have a clear story or theme I wanted to show. To improve this I could've decided earlier on a clear and straightforward idea for what I wanted to do for my animation. This would've caused less stress overall when I was completing my animation as I would know what direction to go in. This would've given me more time to work with and more options as I would be making up less as I go.
This was a very relevant problem of mine. In my animation, a lot of the things I showed were ideas that I created in the moment and didn't put a lot of thought into it and just animated the ideas and hoped for the best. luckily, this time around it was a success for me and I was able to produce all of my ideas to a decent level; however I do understand that doing this could be a problem because if these ideas don't end up working I would have to start over and create a concrete idea anyway. This means that I should plan my ideas better while still linking it back to the theme so I have less risk of things going wrong and giving myself more work than I would have if I thought of more ideas to realise from the beginning of the project.
Concerning the action plan I wrote and how closely I stuck to it through the duration of my project; I actually thought that I did quite well in this respect. This is because throughout the animation I actually stuck rather closely to the dates and the tasks that I had written to do on specific days rather well. However on the action plan I didn't seem to give myself a lot of time to actually edit the video. However I strayed away from the action plan in this regard as I edited the video as I went and not just all at at the end of the project.
This was probably the best decision because a lot of my animation actually relies on the editing that I have done and I believe that if I followed my action plan religiously I wouldn't have been able to do the editing to as good a standard that I did on the actual animation itself. Although I did follow my action plan well, I think I did this almost subconsciously and didn't actually try to follow it too much. I think that I kept my action plan very open ended and didn't pay attention to doing it because I felt as if having an action plan would restrict me somewhat in what I have to do and the time frame I am able to do so in.
However, I think the action plan is just there because it gives you a rough idea of where you want to be in the project and as long as your'e not majorly behind or way too far ahead that you might not have completed the animation to the best standard you could have then you will probably be fine in terms of the animation.
When it comes to my reference list; I think I got a rather good collection of things that helped to inspire my animation. These being other animations, how to videos, or videos that explain themes etc. However, I do think that I could have gotten a wider range of resources and more pieces of research that are from different media such as a book. This would've given me more perspectives on topics and would've bolstered how impressive my research looked as well.
Now when it comes to the actual making of the animation itself I am actually very proud of what I made and happy that I made an animation that I think actually looks well done and somewhat professional. I am happy that I managed to have a distinct feel throughout the animation and all of the scenes I created (to differing degrees) have an uncomfortable or claustrophobic atmosphere, which is exactly what I wanted to create.
When we first started this final project I had no experience in Adobe Animate and choosing to do my project in this media was actually quite daunting because I had no skills in the software but I was confident that this was the best option,time wise and accessibility wise, moreover I was confident that i would gain the skills to use animate to an acceptable level and gain more skills in animating and drawing digitally if I used Animate rather than opting for stop frame animation.
As I progressed through the project I definitely realise that I was getting more proficient at Adobe Animate, I knew how to do things at a greater speed without losing quality and I knew more things about the program, such as the functions and how to utilise layers better.
During the animation, I actually didn't have the best equipment to be using when drawing, I didn't always have a graphics tablet so I resorted to using the mouse to draw some sections of my animations. The way I got past this was by using the smoothing function on Animate. What this function does is smooths the lines out the you draw, this means that even if I'm using a mouse I am able to draw reasonably well and this creates an illusion that I'm using a graphics tablet. This saved me a lot of time when actually drawing and allowed me to get enough work done on days where I thought that I might not be bale to get anything done.
However I shouldn't have gotten so used to drawing like this because when I did get a graphics tablet I sort of had to get used to using it again, this meant I made a lot of mistakes which made me waste some time when I was drawing.
The part that I had the most trouble with during this project was actually the animation itself. I was unsure at first of how to do it and it took me a while to actually get the hang of it properly but once I did I actually had a lot of fun animating. Although I still made lots of mistakes. Moreover, I am very confident that I have the basics of animation and I think that I could make something really impressive if I knew how to draw better digitally. This is because I know how to animate things to a good level but my drawing is not up to par. So this is something I know that I have to practice at to create better animations in the future.
This is rather relevant to me because I actually want to try and make "Fraser" into a series where I slowly unravel the story around Fraser, with this first instalment almost acting as a trailer for what the story of Fraser will be, I haven't decided on this story yet but I know that I should create ideas before I go ahead with animation and plan and research more extensively to make a more polished and coherent animation that still has my style that I think I may have created. My inspiration for this very ambitious idea is David Firth's "Salad Fingers" because I can get a lot of inspiration from his videos because they are very dark and explore concepts I want to follow in my animations. However I don't want my animations to be too similar to "Salad Fingers" because I want my animations to be distinctive and not like I am stealing or copying the original source material.
Moreover, I also had trouble with creating an ending to my animation. This was again down to me not planning the story of my animation well enough so I actually didn't know what to do for the ending. I took inspiration from Lovely Lauren's video "Hypnotic (Meme)" video and tried to emulate what she did however i quickly realised after conversing with peers and teachers that this idea my be too ambitious for me to do right now because frankly I didn't have the skills that she did when she made that animation. I could make something with the same idea but I wouldn't be able to emulate the video in my animation to a good standard.
So I decided on creating an original ending that continues the story instead of having a "music break" that takes the viewer away from the mood I had created in the animation.
In my opinion the easiest and most enjoyable to do part in my animation was the video editing. This is because I have much more skills in video and audio editing in Premiere Pro than animating. This meant that a lot of the animation I did was heavily enhanced by editing. This isn't a bad thing but I do think that I need to learn how to do the things I do on Premiere Pro more effectively on Animate as I could have to do something where I am unable to use Premiere Pro so I need to know how to use Animate to its and my greatest potential.
Moreover, when I created my animation I made all of the scenes in separate Animate files and edited them together as I finished the scenes one by one. I did this because if somehow a file got corrupted and I lost some of my animation I would lose less work than if the animation was all on one file. So I did this as an economic precaution for my animation.
However doing the animation this way meant that I was worried about the continuity of the animation and if the scenes flowed well together. However I wasn't too worried as I was confident in my abilities to edit the scenes so they flowed and kept continuity between them. I could improve this method by perhaps making the beginning of one scene the end of another so I know exactly where to go from one scene the the next.
Secondly, doing the animation this way gave me me more time to actually edit the animation in Premier Pro how I l preferred and perfect the video at that point and gave me more freedom to perfect and change the video as I went along completing the animation. Alternatively, if I did the animation all at once and left the editing to the end, this would've given me more stress as I would have to edit the whole animation together and perfect it as best I can; instead of going at a gentler pace and only having to worry on sections of the animation instead of the whole project at one time at the end.
Overall with my animation of "Fraser", I am actually very happy with what I created, this is because I have improved in a variety of ways since the first and second projects, not just my mechanical and technical skills but my work ethic as well. I cared a lot about this project and I realised all of my ideas to a degree that I am happy with and this project gives me options for what I want to do in the future of this course and I am happy that I made something that I made myself and that I made it for me to show that I am able to create good products and I have also realised that doing something I want to do that makes me happy will help me achieve me more and leave me more fulfilled at the end of the project.