Final animation!!

This is the final render of my animation. I rendered out my character and the chair in Flash, and then imported them into after-effects to add the background. I could then position my character how I wanted to on the screen to improve the composition. I increased the size of the character slightly to emphasise how big he is. I then rendered a MPEG file and also high quality TIFF files with a separate sound file.

I'm really impressed with the quality of my final animation. However I enjoyed the pre-production and postproduction, even though there wasn't much of it, more than the actual animating. The animating part I found really difficult, as I kept noticing little things that were wrong when they should have been changing the big things. I do think this animation has come a long way from the Hayle project, and is much higher quality even in though there were less people working on it (just one) and less time.

Things are really pleased with this animation are:

• the character design-I really think you get a sense of character from his appearance and from the way he moves
• background design- you get a good idea of where he is and how desperate he is from his surroundings
• the lips sync- it is accurate enough that you understand the words that he is saying and shapes are clear
• size and weight- his size doesn't change too much out the animation, and you get an idea of his weight from his movements. I think this is because I filmed myself first, with my size and weight increased
• style-I really liked using this style with sketchy rough lines which move each frame, similar to the Hayle project, but less flickery. I also liked the sketching is the background, not tidied up and still in pencil

Things that could be better in my animation are:

• anticipation overlap- some of the movements don't have any overlap, and I could have improved the ones that do. Also because of his size, I needed to create greater anticipation of things
• I could have included the doctor
• sobbing- I could have emphasised this a bit more, by more violent movements and rocking and shaking

Next time I think I will put more time into the actual animating rather than the aesthetic appeal. However, my favourite part of animation is definitely the designing part, not so much the actual animating. I find animating too frustrating sometimes and can put me off the project.