Explaining Problems
Some problems that I encountered when doing my animation were my own skills at drawing and animating and that I am not very proficient in either qualities. The way I got around both of these problems go as follows.
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Concerning my lack of drawing proficiency I chose to draw in an easy style and make the drawings somewhat messy on purpose. The way I did this was by drawing a simple base of an object and going over each line again for every frame and this gives the drawings a purposefully messy essence. I think this works for my animation because I want to create an unnerving feel and by having messy lines I think this adds to the more hand drawn and unsettling effect that I am going for.
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I also think this type of drawing makes my animation rather unique as I am straying away from being too perfect which makes my animation stand out.
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However due to this style I do understand that this could deter people from liking my animation as it is different from the norm could make people think it is unfinished. Alternatively, it is possible that my animation being in a different/ unsettling style could attract people from my target audience which will be people that have more of a liking to disturbing/unnerving things or products that have an air of difference about them.
The second problem that I faced was that I am not very good at animating. How I overcame this was by doing my animation in 1s, this could be seen as counter productive as animation in 1s usually takes longer but due to me not making the animation perfect. Animation in 1s makes the animation smoother and lends itself to my drawing style.
This is because I am not actually drawing every frame, I am drawing one frame and copying it to other frames and just adding the outline to the object which doesn't take very long at all.
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Another reason why I am doing the animation in 1s is because trying to do it in 2s confuses me as I always seem to get it wrong so instead of worrying about it I settled for animating in 1s as it is the way I understand to animate the most and I would rather not worry about the way I animate and take a while to figure out.
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Animating in 1s seems to be going rather well for me anyway because I am actually quite proud of what I have made so far because before starting this course I had never really animated or edited anything before.
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Furthermore, going back to my lack of drawing skills. On the Adobe Animate app there is a function called smoothing which means that when you draw something on animate if the amount of smoothing is turned up then the program will make the line smooth even if your drawing skills are shaky. This meant that I was able to create a coherent drawing when I don't know how to draw well. I have exploited this function on the program so I don't have to take as much time when drawing.
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I also use this smoothing function because I don't always have a drawing pad to use for my animation and sometimes have to use the mouse so when I use the smoothing function I can make drawings and lines with the mouse look as if I used a drawing pad to make them and have the lines look good when in fact I didn't use a drawing pad.
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How They Were Solved
Sections That Didn't Quite Work
This is a practice test for something that I wanted to be in my animation. This is the beginning of the animation but when I wasn't sure how to animate it correctly, I did fix it and the problems that arose when I was doing this part was that I didn't have the correct equipment to draw it correctly and I wasn't aware that layers were a thing on animate so I tried to animate everything on the same layer which proved to be a very difficult task to do.
Moreover; most of the problems that I faced during the production of my animation were mostly technical issues and not actually knowing how to do things in Animate itself.
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Some examples of this include not knowing how to add certain effects such as Glow and blur effects in Adobe Animate to create lighting a shadow which were crucial for certain parts of my animation. Such as the scene where "Fraser" is watching TV; I needed to create a TV glow so the scene looked more realistic to an extent and give more character and life to the animation, or when I want there to be more tension in a scene, I would add more shadow.
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The way I got around these problems was by experimenting with different tools in Animate and figuring out what did what because I was still very new to the program and wasn't sure what everything did. Eventually I found out that you could convert things you drew into symbols which meant that you could actually add effects to your drawings and edit them more extensively.
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The way I figured out how to do this was by watching a tutorial on YouTube.
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Another problem I faced was not knowing how to add sound to Adobe Animate but this was quickly remedied by a Youtube tutorial.