Final Project Walk Through

The animation begins with the quote 'Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday' fading into view. Next a button which says 'Everyday' fades in and a button which says 'Art' appears afterwards. The viewer can choose which animation they watch first, either the everyday scene or the surreal idea of the everyday.
Once the animation has finished it will link back to the menu page and the viewer can choose the other option.

Evaluation of Final Work

I'm really pleased with my final project. I think the style of the animation looks effective and the drawings have worked well. The movement is smooth and it flows together well. I think the quote at the beginning of the animation fits really well with my idea and the theory behind it and it states the point I was trying to make clearly. The 'Art' part of the animation worked out well and was much more effective for being a mixture of black and white and colour than all colour.
Overall I'm happy with the final product, but if I had more time, I would add more effects and animations to the 'Art' animation but due to time limitations I had to leave it as is.

Changes made to Proposal

After handing the proposal I made a few changes to my ideas.
-After originally wanting to show my animation in a split screen I decided after showing my demo to the class and receiving feedback to change it to the menu page with the option to choose which you watch first. Someone suggested that it may be too cluttered to watch both animations at the same time and things may be missed. I fully agreed with this point of view after considering it so I have created a rough visual idea of how my work will link together in Flash:

-Another change I decided to make was to not have the 'Art' animation in full colour. I felt that the colours in the example included in my demo were to harsh and cartoon like and I wanted the animation to remain realistic to a degree. I also decided to have the rainbow colour following the character instead of her passing moving objects as for my first time using this technique it was easier to animate and still make look effective. I think that the use of colour against the black and white background is a much more effective way to introduce bright colours to the animation and overall it looks effective.

Sound Reference

I used the website www.freesound.org to source the sound effect used on my animation. This particular sound is licensed under The Creative Commons 0 License 

Direct link to the sound:

http://www.freesound.org/data/previews/24/24336_117199-lq.mp3
Accessed: 27/12/11

Illustration Update Part 2

I have completed my 'Art' animations and decided to keep to my idea of black and white with hints of colour. I decided to use rainbow colours following her along the walls next to her which built up and up until the final scene where other imaginative things happen such as plants growing and flowers appearing etc.

Illustration Update

I have been spending most of the time since the last post working on my illustrations. I have completed all of the drawings for the 'Everyday' scenes and have now started work on the 'Art' scenes. I have begun to think about changing my initial idea to have full colour in my 'Art' scene and instead, I might use a mixture of Black and White with hints of colour as I feel the animation looks more effective in black and white but the surreal parts could be done in colour.
Some stills from my work:

Technique

I have begun to draw my frames for my animation and have followed this process:

-I filmed some video footage on my camera of all of the needed scenes

-Using a converting software called 'Pazera free MOV to AVI converter' and 'Virtual Dub' I changed the video from footage to a sequence of still images

-I load the images into photoshop and using a wacom tablet, I've traced one copy of each 5 backgrounds then I paste each new image with character movement on top and rub out the lines of the background and re-draw the character onto the background and repeat for each image.

I've found it has been a lengthy process so far but it has still been effective because I am getting results which I had hoped for.

The Backgrounds: