Will89’s Weblog

These past couple weeks have been a challenge and half, but now it is all finally over and i can gladly say that i believe that i have created a good piece of quality work. To end this unit I would to take the opportunity to make an evaluation about my project.

Looking back on my research that I conducted before creating my animation, I said I wanted to create an animation that didn’t have any reference to violence’s and shoot’em ups blood killing content, which we can find mostly in computer games influenced by TV, film and current events in today’s society.

This is why I decided to venture down the route of creating an animation, aimed at a young audience, predominantly children, but also having the power to reach out to older audiences. In order to achieve this goal, I based my animation around an animal and incorporating the aspects of comedy and how I could create it around the idea of “A day in the life of……”, which is commonly used to help people write autobiographies, recount parts of their life. This idea and the inspiration from the animation “Simon’s Cat”, which I mention in my research, lead me to create my animation “A Doggy Day”. Taking some inspiration from the techniques from the creator of “Simon’s Cat”, Simon Tofield, I took the approach of incorporating the aspect of ‘Black & White’ for my style, for the animation. By using this style of visualization, it gave my animation a level of simplicity, however there was part of me that didn’t agree that there shouldn’t be any colour within the animation. This is where I took further inspiration from the film ‘Sin City’ adapted from the comic books. With ‘Sin City, it is predominantly black and white throughout the film, however the film uses elements of striking colour, for instance bright red to signify blood and bright blue for eyes of some of the characters and lastly the biggest use of colour, yellow for the skin of the character Yellow Bastard.

I decided to take this idea and incorporate into the my animation on a smaller scale, for example I applied colour to the dogs collar, bone and ball, also parts of scenery within the animation, for instance the Sun, the plant pot on the window, the hand and lastly the hole in the garden where the dog buries it’s bone, in order to make the audience feel a little more interested with the animation. If I took the approach of making all black and white I would have feared that my target audience would probably loose interest, as young audiences in today’s society expect a high level of bright colours to grab their interest. A good example of this is the animation Pokémon, which uses a wide and various range of vibrant colours.

Looking back on my research and what I said in my conclusion about how I intended to create my animation based around a day in a life of a dog, with a level of interactivity so that the audience will be able to interact with the dog in various situations and decisions. I feel that I have manage to for fill that goal to a high level and evidence to show that I have can be seen in my animation as the audience can do some of the following below:

· Waking the dog up by clicking on the window so the plant pot smashes.

· Choosing where dog can go, i.e. Kitchen/Living Room.

· Having to find away to get the pie down, with the dog’s bone and ball.

· Sending the dog out of the living room before it does its business.

· Finding a place to bury the dog’s bone.

I have only mentioned a few possible interactive parts for the audience to experience within the animation, but all parts that have an interactive aspect to them does affect on how the narrative progress.

To sum up this evaluation about my animation, I feel that I have managed to produce a good quality interactive animation that successfully targets the audience age to range I set myself at the beginning of this project. However this doesn’t go without saying that this project has been challenging from the word start and over coming my biggest problem, which was transferring over 2000 frames of animation into the right place in Flash, frame by frame, in order to make my animation work. I feel that I have learnt and gain new skills throughout this project and having a better understanding of how Flash works and hopefully in the future will be able to put these new found skills into work.

This will be my last post for the next 5 weeks over the Easter period. When I return to university I will be starting on my Summer Project, which I looking forward to very much.