Horror animation

The learning goal to my personal project is to learn animation and how to tell a good story. To be specific, the things I want to learn in animation is tweening frames, animation on twos and threes, being able to switch between the two. The things I want to learn i telling a good story is mainly building tension, since the first idea to the personal project is horror related. These are my learning goals because animation is another way to tell a story without the limitations of live-action, animation still provides the range of multiple mediums from sound to visuals. I have also been inspired by a multitude of things from known animators, animated movies, music/audiobooks, and friends’ creations that had pushed me to want to create one of my own. Examples are the Legends of Hei fight scenes, Kinema Citrus, and creepy-pasta audiobooks by The Dark Somnium. My motivation for comes from my past animation attempt for a specific competition, it was submitted unfinished and barely recognized by the audience. Animating would be some sort of redemption to this for my team and myself, another reason of motivation is the rise of youtubers playing Gartic Phone, as they animate well and I learnt how to create motion by observing them which made me confident in learning animation. Other than learning how to animate, I want to learn how to create a good story. I used to write multiple unfinished ideas and put out too many ambitions for these ideas, I need to learn how to focus and concise it down into an understandable and digestible story for audiences. I have thought about personal project for a long time, and this is my conclusion, to learn animation and story-telling.

Product Goal

My product will be a horror animated short film. I chose horror because I want to learn how to make tension or an expectation that something scary is going to happen. The product will be influenced by creepypastas. In a sense, an animated short film is a set of products, from soundtracks and visuals. I want to create it abstract and open to interpretation, though still having a true story that only I know.

Reflection

The project went through a lot of changes, and it made it very chaotic, going back to a much more abstract story. The whole process of making the project provided me with learning experience, whenever I got stuck on a thing I want to do is to research and do it in the product’s file. Most of the learning started with asking questions and finding simple answers on the internet. Rather than the product giving me insight on animation, I did animation tests as practice which gave me a much more effective learning experience as I tested on different things in each file which provided me a larger area to improve than the final product provides. From these animation tests, I learnt and used dynamic spacing, tweening, dynamic angles, and animation tests that piece everything together as a simple animation. The quick production of animation tests helped in speeding up learning, animation within the product was static and simple to cut down production time in the latter half of the process (line-art, colouring, shading). The project reminded me of how laborious the animation process really is, but without this, I could have never gotten the motivation to learn more about animation. The impact that it made on me is that I believe that I am now better in animating certain motions and that I know how to use a new software. Adobe Animate has been a huge help in achieving the creation of the product, being user friendly and intuitive. This project is the second big thing related to animation that I made, and i helped me improve a lot. It also reminded me on how much I did not like animating.

Product Evaluation

I am not satisfied with the final outcome of my product, but I see this as a step forward. The plans I made were not followed, and I had high expectations on myself. As the duration became longer in the planning process, the quality dropped. I tried to be clever with the ending as I made it black and white as an artistic choice but it was never the original intention to and I never really liked how it looked. I would like to improve on both storytelling and the animation shown in the product, I am satisfied with the backgrounds though I wish I could have gone for a simpler approach in order to be more dynamic and open more possibilities. The benefits of having a simple background are moving camera angles which I did not do. Instead, 8 detailed backgrounds were shown as a static image or tweened slightly. Colouring and shading also needs to be improved as I was not well informed on how to do it, it brings an unnatural feel to the whole scene when looked up closely and examined. The story is something that needs clarification because it has no dialogue, relying most of the information by visuals and music. Having vague visuals made it hard for the audience to understand the story properly. I also wanted it to be scarier as it doesn’t have much tension throughout, only built up in a couple of seconds to a poorly introduced antagonist. The situation shown to the short film was a challenge to relate as it was abstract and far from any relatable situation. If I were able to do this project again, I would have changed the situation to something more relatable or common, the initial idea was a bully and a protagonist but it got changed too much that I forgot the original concept. If it were a relatable situation the audience would be able to sympathize easily rather than seeing cats get beaten up and get sad over it. The short film did not establish a good connection with the audience, making it not that scary. Though the visuals accompany and carry most of its quality, it’s still very evident that the story is vague and seems unpolished.