Semester 1 Summary

Semester 1 Summary

I am going to try ans summarise this module now for my final submission.

My overall animation project has wavered a bit this semester but is still on track. In all I did 5 sets of animations, some of which had several small animations amongst them. Some of these have been reasonably successful in terms of the technical side of animating in Maya. I have been able to get 

more efficient with the graph editor which has helped me immensely to fix small problems and also to help me create smoother curves and also adding exaggeration.

Some of those animations though are seen as perhaps not failures, but not exactly successes. They have all been useful though in terms of getting me to this point so far, to the point of toon animation. They have helped me to narrow down my project somewhat.

Some of them perhaps could have been worked up more but I felt that would have been just for my ego more than anything, I had gained what I could from them and moved on. Some of them had turned out good though which was managed in less than two weeks. I don't think I spent more than 2 weeks on an animation, in semester 2 though things will be different and I should be spending more time on those animation allowing me to work them up as best I can. The reason I spent no more than 2 weeks on an animation is because I was using them to learn and I moved on once I felt I had learned all I could at that point in my development.

I also did some animation/scene analysis for this project. I did them to help me see how industry professionals have gone about creating character performances and to see how they have composed characters in a scene. These helped me think about my own work in terms of character performance. The Looney Tunes analysis has made me consider the relation of two characters in the same scene and the Toshiro Mifune one has allowed me to observe the ever changing eye contact of some characters. Depending on the personality, and mood, of a character their eye contact will be different. Someone nervous will look erratically around a person (avoiding eye contact in most cases) whereas someone calm will have steady eye contact with other people.

In conclusion, these media analysis have been a good way for me to breakdown how to gain believable character performances and how to stage a scene between two characters.

Semester 2 will see me undertake 3-4 animations that focus on character performance that are based on what I research for my dissertation. I will have plenty of time in the semester to focus on these animations and to work them up to the best that I can. I will think about the sort of scenarios I would like to animate in semester 2 during the holidays; because they will be more substantial than the animations I have done this semester, I will do proper storyboards for them in Photoshop before animating. These storyboards will consider acting, there will be actions and reactions and conflicts. I don't want to just show animation skills, but also some narrative.

One big contingency is that if I end up putting a lot of time in the dissertation then the amount of animations I do is more likely to be 3.

The only problem I have going into semester 2 is my uncertainty, the uncertainty of what I am doing. Is toon actually what I want to do? If I say no then what do I do instead? These are questions that will be answered during the holidays as I prepare for story-boarding at the start of semester 2.