E V A L U A T I O N
DID I MEET MY PROPOSED GOALS AND AIMS?
Overall, I think that I met most of my goals and aims that I started with at the beginning of my project. However, as anyone who has worked on a big project like this will know, ideas and therefore goals evolve and change a bit as time goes on (I will talk more on this later in one of the other sections on this page). My original goal was to pick up and learn new skills along the way while I create a 2D animatic for the first episode of a show about the characters I have created within the universe I have created, all of which was achieved. I also wanted my final product to include sound in the form of voice acting, sound effects and music, drawings that were coloured to show off my illustrative skills as well as more simple drawings too (to make sure that I can complete the project to a suitable so that the story makes sense and can continue) and I also wanted to include different editing techniques using Adobe Premiere Pro as I felt as if this could showcase some more of the skills I have learned on this course. This was all achieved too and I am extremely proud and happy with my result.
DID I MAKE ANY CHANGES THROUGHOUT MY PROJECT?
IF SO HOW DID MY PROJECT DEVELOP?
One thing that I couldn’t be certain about at the start of production was the length and amount of detail I would be able to include in the given time frame, 10 weeks, I originally said that I was going to produce a whole animatic of a short film however the story behind my characters and their journey ended up being too lengthy and I wanted it to be fully coloured so this eventually proved to be too big of a story and too big of a project for something like this. The reason, to begin with, that I did struggle with planning this was because I have never worked on something like this before and was not very sure how fast I would be able to work. To compromise and make things possible for myself I decided to shorten the story down to a first episode kind of thing which introduces the characters and the concept. For a while, before I decided that a first episode was what I was going to make, I considered either that or making a trailer for the whole story - this explains why I included Erica Wester’s ‘Welcome To Hell 2’ trailer in my early research which even though I didn’t end up following the structure of, I still gained inspiration from.
Something I decided once I had confirmed exactly how I would be structuring my work was that I would colour some parts of the animatic to show my skill in that area however also leave a lot of the animatic ‘sketchy’ or as line drawings as these turned out to be easier for me to animate and less time consuming meaning I was able to build on my skills better and create more.
Mid production I also made some small changes too though however. After I had concluded all of the above and made a storyboard, done most of my illustrations written a script, recorded lines for it and finally started editing it all together I realised that there were some spaces that felt a little empty - what I mean by that is there are spaces on the script where there aren’t any sound effects mentioned or any dialogue and I found that when editing everything according to the script the silent spaces and even the fades to black that I added needed to have some sort of sound edited in so it didn’t feel awkward or emotionless. The way I ended up solving this problem was adding in more sound effects and recording some more dialogue for spaces in the video that felt like they needed a bit of a boost to keep an audience engaged.
HOW DOES MY WORK COMPARE WITH MY PRACTITIONERS?
In many ways, In comparison to Erica Wester’s short ‘Welcome To Hell’ I feel that my work touched on many similar things to hers. I think that my characters are unique and have many good qualities from their designs to their personalities, It can be told easily that Erica has knowledge on character design theory and used it within her project and as did I, I think the way they interact and the whole of my video possesses a similar effective art style and genre to ‘Welcome To Hell’ as they both have the quality of being both dark and quirky but also in a way lighthearted and comedic - they have the same vibes. If I were to put both videos in a box i feel that they would both fall into the same one and I would probably describe that box as a dark comedy, not to mention they are both 2D, hand drawn and use voiceover and sfx in the same way. I really do think that a lot of my art and the skill when it comes to drawing is there and can compare well to Erica’s and I am proud of that. Welcome To Hell inspired me at the beginning of the project while I was coming up with my ideas all the way through until the end, I feel like it helped me a great deal and I think my work does compare quite well in the ways that I hoped and the ways it possibly can.
I knew that obviously my work could never in these circumstances reach the same level as ‘Welcome To Hell’ due to the fact that many people worked on it with Erica and she had a longer time frame to create hers. Erica Wester’s video is fully animated and basically fully synced because her’s is defined as an animation, mine is an animatic, meaning most of it is not synced however I think I did a pretty good job to sync the mouth shapes with the words in a few scenes and hope to practice this more in the future.
The trailer of Welcome To Hell 2, which I also featured in my practitioners section came out just over 2 years ago now, so obviously my project could not reach the same level, but I think in the time given I have reached a good point and I feel that if I were to work at it and my skills for longer I could reach this level, I can accept and be happy about this.
Another one of my practitioners was Hedy Clark, more specifically her animated short project ‘The Lamb’. I feel that my product does compare to this quite well - both the full video and the animatic version I also featured on my site - I think that things such as the genre and vibes and the art and the way it is presented. There are also obviously similarities when it comes to what the projects are and what they have - sfx, voiceover etc. - I think that Hedy does a really good job in her video at giving each of the characters a different and unique vibe and personality through both appearance and voice acting and I think that I did this quite well too. Both videos possess the dark kind of vibe I keep talking about and which most of my practitioners have. I believe that mine and Hedy’s techniques are similar in a sense that we both did things like showing a location to establish a setting, using blank space in the animation while characters are talking sometimes to create suspense. I also think that we have a similar style when it comes to drawing when it comes to types of brushes we use and more and I think our art skills compare well and our animation/animatic skills. Our products are similar in the sense that not all of the words sync up to mouth shapes but the final result still comes out effective, as can be seen by the positive response she got online.
When it comes to ‘The End Of The Fxxxing World’, I feel that while my project is extremely different in many ways I feel that it has, again, some of the qualities there such as it’s dark comedy kind of genre. It has a sarcastic charm which I always admire and find deeply entertaining in film or any media such as this and I think in some ways I captured this and would have loved to incorporate more of it. Another thing I talked about in my research was the characters and their relatability because of the type of dialogue used - the characters thoughts are narrated over most scenes. While I did not do this in the same way as TEOTFW, I instead took this and twisted it a little so that my character directly adressed the audience at points, a sort of fourth wall break kind of thing. Overall I think this practitioner helped me with inspiration for my characters personalities and ideas about genre more than anything and I think I did move away from thinking about The End Of The Fxxxing World when it came to production as it sort of became irrelevant as time went on and I had established my characters and the genre. The main similarity and comparison would probably be the genre in my opinion.
Something else I looked at within my research as a sort of practitioner but also just to see a general picture of what an animatic generally looks like in industry was the Art 2 Animation YouTube videos about the filmmaking process for films such as ‘Spider- Man Into The Spider-Verse’ or Pixar films such as ‘Up’ or ‘Luca’. I think that my product does compare to these in a way because in the sense of what they are and how they are made to tell a story and I did a similar thing. Some parts of mine are more developed/coloured than them though however I think that I am proud of this fact and the fact I got further than I expected. I also looked at animatics within the YouTube community as they are very different to animatics such as the ones Pixar and Sony come out with. YouTube animatics are used as a visual representation of something like a story or a song and are often the only thing to come of that particular creative product. The animatic is the finished product whereas animatics in the animated film industry are often used for planning for future further work so that the artists can progress to future stages of the creation process - for that reason animatics on YouTube of that type are usually fully coloured in places or are sometimes extremely detailed. I feel that my animatic fits within the YouTube animatic scene as mine has qualities such as these too. I think I did a good job at creating a final product which is suitable for YouTube.
HOW WELL DID MY RESEARCH, IDEA DEVELOPMENT AND EXPERIMENTATION HELP ME?
Overall, something I can be completely sure on when it comes to my FMP is that the tasks I had to do such as research, idea development, experimentation helped me in many ways, and it all helped me extremely well skill wise and confidence wise. Everything I looked at and figured out through all of these sections of my project helped me one way or another. My secondary research helped me to further understand things that I would need to create my finished video, and helped me to find inspiration and therefore motivation to create and my primary research helped me to better understand what my target audience would want from me and also get better references through photography and therefore inspiration from the real world around me too. My idea development helped me to plan in many different and extremely useful ways. My experimentation helped me to learn by practically using software and actively creating resources and things to help me in the future. I seperated my expreimentation into two sections as I was experimenting with ideas and learning new things the whole way through my project.
I think something I could have done better when it comes to all of this though was to look deeper into the Premiere Pro software through both research and experimentation, I just struggled with where to start as the only experience I have with Premiere is doing certain things I have been told to do by tutors on previous projects - other than that I don’t have much experience and therefore only know what certain parts of the software are used for - Even though I definitely have dedicated a good amount of time getting used to the software during this project and before starting this project, I think it would definitely be useful to sit and dedicate some more time when I don’t have the pressures of a deadline on my shoulders.
WHAT WOULD I DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME? WHAT DID I LEARN?
If there was an opportunity to do-over all of this I think something I would say to myself is to not panic so much. I struggle with nerves a lot around just about anything - especially if it’s new - but I think that in many ways my panic held me back and I would like to think that if I did this all again I would do a better job at helping myself with that. I pushed myself quite hard and that is a good thing, I just need to know when to calm down.
Another thing I would do differently is I think I would try to manage my time a bit better so that I have more time on editing, finding sfx and recording lines. I feel as if these processes were somewhat rushed due to the amount of drawings I had to make by hand.
I think the main thing I learnt was that I can do it. Finally trying and completing something like this which I've been wanting to do for so long proved to me that I have the skills to create something like this and I am really happy to have found that out. I have never done it before because of the doubt I had of myself and my insecurities but now I feel that if I did this project again, being used to and in the habit of using the software and knowing what I know now from my research etc, I think I would do so much better.
DOES THE PRODUCT REFLECT THE THINGS I HAVE LEARNT THIS YEAR WELL?
I strongly believe that my finished video reflects the things that I did and learned this year. I think that you can see that very clearly if you knew me at the start of the year and compared that to me now. It takes a lot for me to step back and look at my progress to say that I am proud but I think I really am proud of how far I’ve come.
When I started on this course at college, my goal was to learn and become more digitally minded as before joining the course I always said that I was not good with computers - when I first got to college I even struggled a bit when it came to turning on the computers - but now, I can see how much I have developed. I can do so many things I thought I’d never be able to do. I never thought I’d be able to create something like this ever before joining this course, I wouldn’t know where to start beyond doing the drawings, this course has taught me so much about things in my final project, I used this new knowledge and the techniques on things such as audio recording, audio editing, video editing the software, Premiere Pro, to help me. The progress I have made on this course was crucial to me being able to create something like this.
IS IT AN ACCURATE REPRESENTATION OF MY SKILLS? AM I PROUD OF IT?
I think that in many ways this final product is an accurate representation of my skills. I think I not only showed the skills I have when it comes to illustration but also the skills I have learned on this course and talked about in the previous question I just answered.
I am really happy and proud to have completed this project as I have put so much time and effort into it and pushed myself a lot and it seems, so far, to have paid off. People seem to like my work so much more than I expected they would and I am really grateful for that. I am looking forward to hopefully progressing to my second year and developing my skills even more.
DID MY FINAL PRODUCT APPEAL TO MY TARGET AUDIENCE?
After posting my final product on YouTube and mentioning it on other platforms, I was nervous. I was scared that people wouldn’t understand my video or what I was trying to achieve and I was scared people would think that it wasn’t very good in comparison to the work of many others.
A lot of this insecurity went away though when I started to gain a positive response from the people within my target audience range. Some of these people I knew well, some a little bit but some I didn’t know at all. It had appeared that my animatic had reached a much wider audience than I thought it would and this was all only on the first day of uploading.
I will feature some of the feedback I got in a video below.
Overall I completely agree with this feedback in the picture above and look forward to developing my skills to a point where I can improve on the things I need to improve on.