My Completed Animation and Self Evaluation

And here it is...

Self Evaluation

Overall, I would say that I am  really pleased with how my animation turned out. I think it was successful and portrayed my message well, but it definitely could have been improved upon somewhat. 

Challenges

Working on my own seemed like a great idea to begin with, being able to use all of my own ideas; being able to work in my own time and in the comfort of my own home. However, in hindsight, working with others would definitely have had it's benefits and eased my workload, probably making the whole process seem a little less daunting and tiring.

Moving the camera (Ipad in my case), putting it down and then moving the pieces of paper and clay was no easy task and was very time consuming indeed. Even though the animation was meant to be approximately 2 minutes, it took a lot longer to actually prepare the objects, take photos, move the objects, take photos (repeat) and then eventually  edit it and work out any little glitches that came my way.

I think of myself as a creative person and love art and anything I can get hands on and creative with, however I did find it a very fiddly task. 

In my eyes, Zu3D proved to be a great tool for animating quite simply however it did present me with some annoyances. When trying to move certain frames, it would leave empty frames (a black screen) where they had moved from, meaning  that I had to try and move each individual frame one by one, to fill the gaps. When I thought I had found a quicker way, by highlighting a few frames at a time to move, they only decided to reverse order, which meant that I had to move every single frame back to their correct position, this seemed endless but I just about managed to get them back to their original position, although not perfect.

Successes

I really enjoyed this project, in fact It will probably be the most interesting university project I will have completed whilst at University.

This really gave me a chance to use my creativity and use my own mind to think outside of the box and reflect an issue in my own way. It also give me the opportunity to appreciate the animations that I see around me every day, from adverts I see to the cartoons and movies I have watched; how long they must take to produce and how skilled the creators are.

Although I did not include certain effects such as narration  and sound effects, I feel that I met all the requirements asked of me and felt that my animation really didn't need any other effects.

For parts where I wanted to use my own hands in the shot I asked my boyfriend to be the camera person and take multiple shots. I felt this worked very well and came out just as I had hoped!

How could I have improved?

I could have improved upon my animation by beginning the whole process a lot earlier: researching; planning; preparing; filming and editing. This would have given me a lot more time to really develop the animation further and perfect it to make transition between frames a lot smoother. Looking back on my animation; I wish I included more information on the incident that happened; perhaps showing news paper cut outs and facts about how many people were killed etc and the image of the magazine that led to the terrorism attack; I feel that If I had made the intro/title a little bit shorter I could have included more of this.