F I N A L O U T C O M E
MY ORIGINAL INTENTIONS:
My original intentions for this project were to create a 2D animatic short episode about my character Jaxon being introduced to his new ‘life’ after dying and becoming a zombie. I wanted my characters, both Jaxon and Zombie 1, to be funny and interesting and I wanted them to contrast with one another in a comedic way to allow the tone to be perfectly dark and comedic at the same time. I think I did acheieve this. Something else I wanted for my final product was to learn. I wanted to learn and therefore develop my skills in this area and become more confident in my ability along the way - again all things I think I achieved - creating this project has inspired me to create more.
OBSTACLES I HAD TO OVERCOME:
Something that I have mentioned before as an obstacle was most definitely the time. Hand drawn 2D animatic and time don’t really mix together well, something I definitely struggle with is overestimation on how much I will be able to get done without entirely sacrificing my physical and emotional health, I struggled with the fact, as I commonly do, that before I make a big illustration or start a big project I envision it so clearly in my head to be perfect and imagine it to be of the quality of what 100s of people make together in a studio in a matter of years. I had to accept that I am still learning, my short film is not going to be industry level quality if I am working on it alone and with a time limit such as this. I needed to not push myself so hard.
One other thing I struggled with was finding sound effects that wouldn’t go against the rules of copyright. It was hard to find both free and good quality sounds however by using a site called freesound and using an MP3 converter on YouTube I was able to find the ones I needed, some of them I feel could be better quality though.
Something else I found was a struggle was that I had to find ways around the fact that,eventually after doing so many drawings, my iPad would be overwhelmed due to the fact I hadn’t created something as big as this in as short amount of time and suddenly quit and therefore shut down Procreate, because of this, sometimes things wouldn’t save. Keeping my calm in situations like this was something I really needed to work on in order to stick to my deadline. In addition to this a big obstacle I had to overcome during this whole thing was myself and my anxieties, as can be seen, this project contains voice acting - Something I have never done before - and something about myself that I am very insecure about is my voice therefore the task of voicing Jaxon and then eventually having to share this online was a very hard one for me and though I think I could have done better at being louder and possibly more confident, I did end up overcoming my feelings and the product is now up on YouTube for anyone to see if they want to.
AM I HAPPY WITH THE FINISHED PRODUCT?
I feel really happy with myself about the amount of work I have got done, especially because of the amount of drawings I had to make. The amount of drawings I did by hand alone come up to more than 100 and i think that is pretty impressive given the time I had to do written work, editing, find sound effects, music, record the speech and more. I am also really proud of the knowledge I gained and put to use when it comes to animation, sound and editing, especially since I have never tried to make something like this before,I feel as if my skills have grown a lot. As previously mentioned though, I think I pushed myself a lot and was originally hoping to get loads more done so the finished product isn’t exactly what I envisioned but in the time it just wasn’t possible. Something I feel a fair amount of doubt about is if the video is understandable enough to audiences - there were things that I didn’t have time to draw such as when characters are walking to a different location so I had just included footstep sounds in hope that the audience will understand. I also wonder if my script is able to keep people interested throughout the video. I feel that it is hard to tell these things because I know what is happening to the characters as a creator but how can I know for sure that my audience does too just by what I have shown them? This kind of judgement is something I want to work on.
I do accept all of these challenges I faced though, I feel that I did a good job and there is so much that I have done over the past weeks that I am very proud of. I look forward to building on my skills in the future.