Final Statement

WEEK 7 DAY 3 : Editing

For this last day, I showed my tutors my final draft and my tutor explained to me the small details which I needed to edit. These consisted mainly with further editing of the sound and so overall I am pleased with the outcome. I worked extremely hard on this project and it was a tremendous learning experience. I am contented with it visually and it was satisfying to see my concept. In the future I would like to try and work more on the story make it stand out more and test the limits. I took a huge risk producing my animation in a cartoon style however I am very pleased with it. I am pleased with the boldness and the colour palette. I would like to experiment more on sound to further gain more skills and understand sound in more detail for my future animation projects. I really enjoyed creating this project and I am none the less happy to see it finally finished. 

WEEK 7 Day 1: Finalising production, sound and editing

For this final week, for the first couple of days I worked on filling in the gaps for my animation with different short scenes in order to give flow to my work. I next exported the flash file and imported it into ‘Adobe Premiere’ in order to put the final film in order. I had never used this program before, however, in the past I have used ‘Final Cut Pro’ so it was quite easy to get the hang of this new software package. Once I had done this, I recorded lots of different sounds which I would need for each scene and imported them into Premiere and edited them in order to fit the characters.

Fig 1: Adobe Premiere Editing (2014) Authors Own






















Fig 2: Adobe Premiere Editing sound (2014) Authors Own

I found sound extremely hard to produce. What I found the most difficult about the sound was trying to edit the sounds so that they didn't sound too realistic, as it wouldn't fit in with my animation concept. In particular, I struggled to find the perfect voice-over for the troll as some voices were too high pitched. However, after a great deal of time and patience editing, I am pleased with my sound results. In the future I shall try to give myself more time during a project in order to work more on sound. Sound gives life to the characters and so it is important for it to be perfect.

I then added my credits and title ‘Marcus Lost in Trollslation’ to finalise my project. I decided I wanted the credits inside of the film and so I overlaid them over my animation piece using ‘Premiere’.

Fig 3: Credit Placements (2014) Authors Own

Week 6 Days 2 & 3: Production

For the remainder of the week I continued animating the difficult scenes in order to afterwards fill in the gaps. I also sketched out some quick princess concept drawings to give me an idea of what I would like her character to look like.

What I enjoyed the most this week though was designing the inside of Marcus's stomach. I had never designed something like this before and straight away I knew what I wanted to produce. A bit like ''The Dog who was a Cat Inside'' I want the spectator to be able to visualise the inside of Marcus's stomach. In order to do so I created an extra layer which I made transparent so that you can see the princess clearly. I really enjoyed this technique and I know that it is definitively something I would like to recreate in the future as I find it really effective.

Fig 1: Screenshot showing transparent layers (2014) Authors Own

Fig 2: Opaque stomach Design (2014) Authors Own

Fig 3: Final (2014) Authors Own

I also went on to computer designing the princess in order to begin animating her and adding her into different scenes. I wasn't too keen on the idea of designing a princess because princesses are stereotypically the same; as compared to monsters which are all different one to another. I tried to give her a little bit of a difference by giving her red hair and a crooked crown. I was generally pleased with the outcome as I imagined it coming out worse.

Fig 4: Princess Design 1 (2014) Authors Own

Fig 5 : Final Princess Design (2014) Authors Own

Another aspect of my animation which I really enjoyed creating was the vomiting scene. I really liked playing around with transparency and thought it would be fun to have see-through monster vomit as we would be able to distinguish the princess clearly.

Fig 6: Opaque vomit 1 (2014) Authors Own






















Fig 7 : Opaque vomit 2 (2014) Authors Own

Week 6 Day 1 : Production

  I made a plan for the up-coming next two weeks which consisted of finishing the most difficult scenes in the first week, followed by the easier scenes. I would work on creating the sounds for my animation in the final few days.

Over the weekend I started to animate some of the most drastic scenes such as the metamorphosis and eating scene. I thought that these were quite hard to animate as in my opinion as they focused on facial expressions. Strangely I found it easier to animate the characters bodies rather than their facial expressions. However it is the facial expressions is what mainly gives life to each character.

Also I realised that I made a huge mistake while I was creating the Marcus character designs when I created an arm I made it as one whole symbol and so I could not animate it properly. I didn't realise that when you create a character you need to follow the human anatomy and so have 3 different joints for an arm in order for it to move properly. I then had to recreate different parts of Marcus' body such as the arms and legs. I have learnt from this time consuming mistake and I shall never do it again.

I also experimented using the bone structure tool to see if I could animate my character that way. I was not pleased with the result because the way the character moved didn't align with my notion of his character. It was too smooth and I wanted him to move in a more jagged way. I decided to animate him the longer way which meant that I would be more satisfied with my end result and pleased with the way in which he moves.

Fig 1: Experimenting with Bone Structure (2014) Authors Own























Fig 2 : Eating Scene Screenshot (2014) Authors Own

Fig 3: Metamorphosis Scene Screenshot (2014) Authors Own 

























Fig 4: Marcus Walking Forward Draft (2014) Authors Own