Applied Animation: Evaluation

Before starting this project, I had no experience using 3D software. For the most part this year I have been creating animation on a strictly two dimensional plane, often creating assets in Photoshop and compositing everything in After Effects. For the Studio Brief, we were required to use Maya to complete a series of tasks involving modelling and animating, which gave us a basic broad understanding of the essentials. It took me a while to get a handle of interface and I'll admit I had trouble in the beginning manipulating basic polygons, however after completing the tasks I am looking forward to sitting down with Maya again and getting to know it's nuances, as 3D to me is an interesting potential creative tool. I do wish I had animated in-betweens for my Moom walk cycle so that the movement were smoother and the truck I modelled could have used some colour and more detailed features, however poor time management and the need to finish my title sequence refrained me from spending as much time as I had hoped to getting to know Maya. 

As for my title sequence, while I do feel it lives up to the potential demonstrated in my animatic, in hindsight probably could have used more mixed media techniques as well as time developing the typographical elements, as I do feel it is a bit lifeless. The intention was to create a detailed graphic style from vectors drawn in Illustrator, however I do feel that some of the assets such as the trees and especially the final shot were poorly drawn and overly simplistic. My characters also lack real expression and animation as I was working with limited assets. If I were to reanimate the characters in my title sequence I would include more facial details, such as blinking and different mouths, though I am happy with the way my characters hair moves when they tilt their head, I do wish I could have included more subtle details such as this in order to really sell the performance. 

For my blog for this module I tried something different, opting for longer blogposts documenting my production as well as my more throughly explaining my thought process in the pre-production stages. I do feel that this has paid off and as a result the quality of my blog has improved, so this is definitely something I will think about carrying over to projects in second year. However, probably my biggest takeaway from this module is how to properly manage workflow in After Effects. When it came to rendering out my animation I went through a lot of trouble, as I exceeded the image buffer size in After Effects, a result of not effectively seeding my compositions and putting too many effects and assets in the main comp. This led to me re-compositing everything in my project the night before the deadline in order to get it to render which was poor use of my time, time which would have been better spent writing for my blog. making additions to my title sequence or refining my work in Maya. In the future I will make sure not to overload the main composition with too many assets and perhaps export my animation in smaller more manageable chunks in order to boost efficiency, as I spent a lot of the day before the hand in for this module waiting for work to render.