Animated Reality Working with Maya

Working with Maya, this took a while to get used to you the moving 'Norman'  around, however I have developed enough skills to create a scene for our World in a Room project

Edinburgh Project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tw1j17UlCU&feature=youtu.be

I enjoyed this project thoroughly and felt this helped to attain a basic level of understanding on how to produce a short animation.  During the project I realized the importance of setting out key frames and developing a storyboard, concept and story as a strong basis for the animation to progress.  I enhanced my skills working as a team to produce a coherent and well thought out piece of work.  I researched the project in full by gathering information, both site specific and informative sketches from the start.  This then lead to creating a storyboard to link the team sketches together and deciding on a theme to make the project work as an overall animation, rather than just individual pieces of work.

During the initial stages choices had to be made weather to keep the images and structure similar in style to make a cohesive animation and as a team we made choices about use of colour, style of images, sound and how to transition between shots, although in my opinion we perhaps could have allocated more time to this stage.  This meant making choices that would not suit everyone, but this was done in a professional way.  At this stage we researched the best way to put our animation together and looked at other animation films as examples for our sketches e.g. Bob Godfreys 1974 animation “ Rubarb ”  I used applications such as “Take 5” to check the timings were working on my part of the animation and made decisions about adding more scenes after using this and worked as a team to put together the final animation.

This was I felt a very quick project, however this may be due to a number of factors for example being new to the department and finding my way around the systems and procedures and the process of the work itself.  It was beneficial working in a team with different skill levels and knowledge; however this also had a downside that the more skilled members of the team had more work to do and it was also difficult to all work on the computer at the end, this may work better in smaller teams.  As an individual I felt that I had learned a process from start to finish and could competently produce a similar piece of work on my own, with some improvements from the skills I have developed during the process.  Another area of development was to make sure all the information is gathered that will be required prior to putting the animation together, because we didn’t do this it meant more work in the production process

Some other challenges were making sure there was enough time to work on sound and that it would be compatible for other media and testing final animation. For example does it look the same on a big screen? Was there enough sketches versus Pixilation?  Also think about what we are trying to portray as an overall look, if we are taking the audience on a journey through the animation, then people usually expect a destination/closure.  Working as a team went well, but as your work develops your individual style and taste will become stronger and you may be less inclined to negotiate as much.  Transitions could also be a development point and research how others may do this in clever and interesting ways.  Overall I feel the project was a success and given more time I feel we could have produced some quality work.