Environment Project EVALUATION 16th January 2017

Evaluation

What artists or animations have influence you in this project?
Two artists, or rather their animations, have inspired me during this project, Julien Lassort and his animation for a music video ‘Alb – The Road’ and Nata Metlukh with her animation ‘Fears’. I have taken inspiration from these artists when thinking of the style in which I could create my two worlds. On one hand, you have got a black and white animation, which is filled with clean minimalistic line work. On the other hand, you’ve got an animation which is filled with colour and is very loose and expressive, giving the impression of a lot of movement. This gave me the inspiration for both of the worlds in which I would create, the ‘good’ world would be the one in which I would take inspiration from Nata Metlukh and the ‘evil’ world, would be the world in which I would find inspiration from Julien Lassort and his piece.
In my sketchbook, I had also mentioned an artist by the name of Johfra, he was an artist who I wanted to take inspiration from, by creating work in a similar theme. More specifically, I had taken a liking to his pieces in which from a distance it would resemble a weird formation of rocks, but when looked at closely you can see the formation is actually formed with a lot of small characters, people/monsters. This is something I wanted to recreate in my own animation, specifically in the ‘evil’ version of my street, however this did not happen, as I felt it would be too much detail within a simple animation, and no one viewing it would have been able to see all of the details as the animation would go by so fast. As I have not used Johfra in this project, I do think I will keep him in mind for another project, possibly one which is more illustration based, rather than animation.

What have you researched in this project?
As I had answered in the previous question, the animations in which I had researched at the start of the project, are what had influenced my style and approach to the animation and the theme.
During this project, I had also taken primary photos of my street. These photos had helped me get a better understanding of the assets in which I needed to create for my street. They had also been useful when it came to positioning my camera in cinema 4D as I could use the photos almost as a guide, for where I should be facing in specific key frames.

Evaluate your development.
In this project, I wish I had experimented with more medias when creating my assets. If I would have created more traditional pieces, rather than digital, I feel it would have given my designs more quality behind them, even if it were just in the textures of the grain within paper.  
In my animation, like in most of my projects, I have struggled with time. In other projects, when I have said this, I normally meant this in the way that I was leaving all of my work till the last minute. Although yes, I have done that slightly in this project, in this specific sense, I am meaning that I have had problems with the timing in my animation. At first my whole animation was quite fast, with the middle frames flashing past the viewer’s eyes at a very quick speed. To fix this problem I added in an extra 100 frames and reset the positioning of my camera. This had fixed the problem within the middle frames of my animation, however made the first and last frames quite speedy again. At this point, I had started to panic as the deadline drew closer, as I still had a lot of work left to complete, within the animation, the sketchbook of research that goes with it, and all of the other projects that would needed to be handed in at the same time as this project. Because of these reasons, I decided to leave the animation as it was, and started editing the animation further in after effects.
  
Final Evaluation.
Personally, I do like my final animation and I feel I am gaining more and more confidence within animation as the course goes on. As this is only my second animation I have created, I am very happy with the outcome. Although I can definitely improve the piece in some areas, I.E. the timing, I feel that I have done well so far and I am still learning more and more ways in which I can strengthen my skills and improve my work further.
Although I do like the outcome, I do not think the piece fully represents the idea I had intended. Whereas the ‘evil’ world is quite simplistic, I had wanted it to be creepier, so that it would give more of a contrast between the two worlds, and possibly even loosely relate to the theme of schizophrenia. I felt like my piece were going to loosely represent the mind of a schizophrenic, and how sometimes they may perceive the world around them. However now, I don’t feel as if I see this theme at all. If I had more time, I may have added more aspects which could have possibly made this theme more visible to the viewers.
Sometimes during this project, I did feel I should have went with another idea, this was because when drawing the assets, it did get a little repetitive, and I did often wish I were drawing something with a more imaginative theme. If I were to have done this, I feel I would have had more free space in which I could have created my scenery, rather than having to work within the small area of a street, where you are surrounded by countless amounts of assets in which you can’t move around without bumping into one of them.

All in all, I did enjoy this project and I do feel I have learned a lot from it. Hopefully I can take what I have learned and use it in more depth in future projects. Also in future projects, I will try to keep on track with my time management, as I do not enjoy having to rush everything in the final weeks of the projects.  

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