Animation Evaluation

There are a few things with this animation that I am not completely satisfied with. Had I managed my time better I would have focused my attention on the movement of the characters, as it is through body language, the most effective way of portraying emotion. Viewing my animation after completion it is clear to see that the characters are both very static, without the voice-overs that I made for both characters it is much more difficult to defy the emotions that each character is trying to convey.

Having said this it is obvious when listening to the sound as well as watching the animation the emotions each character is trying to display: scary (snake) and terrified (tortoise.) I am impressed with how the lip-syncing came out. There are only the odd couple of frames where it is slightly out of time, this is down to the speed in which the voice-overs were recorded causing problems with key frame spacing in Flash. The line drawings although simple, look professional due to their development in illustrator. The backgrounds that I designed give the piece a nice finish and were quickly and easily created in Photoshop.

Unfortunately, looking back on the brief and the outcome requirements I think that my animation was a bit miss-directed. I spent far too much time trying to create realistic looking cartoon characters and although it has a professional animated feel, the overall piece is let down by the lack of movement. If I were to do this project again I would have made a 3-Dimensional animation using Maya. I regret using Flash, although it gave me a nice quality finish and was easy to import sound, I was let down by my expectations of the capability of motion tweening. This was the only part of production that didn’t go according to plan resulting in the time consuming task of drawing each individual movement out in Illustrator.