Evaluation
The aim of the animation was to find a recent news story and base a narrative around that, being inspired by something that is happening in the world. In doing so I have been able to demonstrate my skills in story telling and animation techniques, as well as finding new ways to further improve my skills. When deciding on a news story I started looking into the conflict in Syria and finding out about the situation there and how it has effected peoples lives, focusing on how it has effected children who have been caught up in the conflict, who's lives have been completely changed by it. When researching into this I found the story of a young boy who had been caught up in this horror, the boy was talking about his experience and what he had seen, how confusing it all was and some of the terrible things he had to go through to survive, such as hiding in a car full of bodies, he also went on to say that since he got to the refugee camp he was told to keep quiet and not talk about the things that had happened. As a result of this I came with a rough narrative I wanted to explore in response to this boys experience. I decided my characters would be 2 brothers who live in Syria and the confusion and horror of what they are going through because of the conflict.
I image the desperate state of mind that these people must be in as a result of the sights they've seen, which too often, are the consequence of major conflicts involving civilian populations. To get across my ideas I designed the brothers in a childish style, being quite simplistic. I decided that the children should have no mouth in response to what the boy I have based the story on said about having to keep quite, I feel that representing this by them having no mouths would reflect upon what the situation is like and how their not supposed to talk about it. I also made the decision that instead of having soldiers I would have the turn into monsters, this is to show the horror and confusion of the children and how horrific this experience is for them. Once I had my idea I drew out a rough storyboard to start out with, taking time to think of how I wanted to portray the narrative. After a few alterations to develop the story into something I was happy with, I was ready to begin making my animation. I decided that I was going to hand draw my animation but use my Photoshop skills to compile the elements together. The process for doing this was to first design each character and then, using tracing paper, draw out each frame for each little movement that I wanted, cutting out the previous drawing then tracing over it, slightly changing it for each frame. The way I am doing this allowed me to only need to draw out movements once and then I would be able to reuse them if I wanted, even so it takes a long time to get a simple movement in animation and so I spent a lot of time drawing out different characters and monsters, figuring out how they would move and react to what's around them. When designing the monsters I had to think about how each of them would move in a way that suited each design, weather it be that they walked in a certain way or even if they float and how they would appear. Each movement had to be drawn very carefully lining up as best I could with the previous frame, for example, a running animation for the children I would line up and draw out things that wouldn't need to change such as the head and then draw out the things such as arms and legs which would move slightly to create the next frame to give the appearance the character is running when all the frames are played together, each step taking a total of 6 frames, 12 frames for the whole running cycle. Once I had drawn out everything I wanted, the backgrounds and frames, some from different angles so the character could turn around, I scanned each set of characters into my computer. I then took them into Photoshop, where using my skills I was able to clean up the images so I could get them how I desired, editing brightness and contrast so the lines would show better, for the backgrounds and characters, then removing blank space around the characters, using the magic wand tool to delete it, so I could simply select the movement I wanted. Once I had everything as I wanted I was ready to start putting together the animation. Still using Photoshop I composed each frame by starting out with a background and then going and copying a movement from each character that would be in the scene and pasting them on top of the background in layers, editing the size of each character as they needed to fit into the scene, to represent depth. Each frame I had to select the next movement for each character in that scene and line it up with the previous movement, then moving it slightly and deleting the old movement once in place, I had to make sure they where the same size and right place so the animation would run smoothly. After composing a frame I then saved each time as a JPEG file and named each a number so I knew what order they would be played in, saving them as a JPEG allows me to take the now flattened frame into Movie maker where I put the frames together. The technique of using layers in Photoshop in not too different than how animation used to be created without computer technology, Photoshop makes this process easier but the idea of layering the components on top of each other is the same, as animation studios such as Studio Ghibli or Disney used to work by hand drawing the backgrounds and characters separately, layering each character on top of the background and taking a photograph to create a frame, more recent animations may have been created using software such as Adobe Maya, although some are still made using older techniques. However the process is still very long, as there are a few stages to it, from the drawing to editing in Photoshop and compiling each frame together all take a long time to do. there are some limitations with this technique, you need to know exactly how you want to compose each scene once in Photoshop, as if anything needs altering you have to go back to hand drawing for the most part, there are some basic workarounds in Photoshop you won't always be able to get the effect as desired, for example if you wanted a scene in a certain angle, say looking up at a character, this would have to be hand drawn before hand as even with the tools in Photoshop that allow you to alter how you would at an object or character it wouldn't have the desired effect. On a couple of occasions I did have to go back to hand drawing a few things, there is a scene in my animation that has silhouettes, while changing the colours in Photoshop is easy enough, it leaves the image rather undesirable taking away from the stylised look I was going for, so I went back and re-drew some basic standing poses for a human character and monsters but as a silhouette instead. After I had all the frames ready I took them into movie maker to create the animation. I selected a couple of songs and an explosion sound effect to add to my animation that I felt would fit with it. I placed the songs and sound in as needed, using movie makers 'split' tool to cut the sounds where needed I needed to so I could use the next one. I chose songs that would fit the mood of my animation so at the start it's quite happy, the 2 brothers playing and so I selected a happier song, and then explosion goes off and a sad song plays after that. I had some trouble with the explosion scene here, I had wanted it to be a white screen shaking, with the explosion sound effect in the background but because of the limitations in movie maker the best I could get was for the screen to flicker. I shortened each frame down so I had the animation running at about 12FPS (Frames Per Second) I changed this on some frames, by increasing their run time, to add a pause where needed, thanks to this my animation runs quite smoothly. If I where to do this again I would spend more time drawing out more frames for characters and drawing more backgrounds so I can get the scenes exactly how I want them, I would also spend more time thinking about the storyboard and how I would compose each scene before starting to work on the frames. I also would take more time to work on more frames and create more of them for each movement to have a better FPS. Overall I am happy with how my animation ahs turned out, the narrative changed slightly along the way because of some of the limitations and difficulties I faced but it didn't stray so far off that it became something else, I stuck with my idea and kept at it making it into what I wanted to produce. In the future I want to explore different animating techniques, using different computer software learning and finding new ways to improve my skills. In creating this animation I have gained a better understanding to the amount of work, time and effort that goes into creating an animation and how to do so, also improving my Photoshop skills along the way and finding ways to animate a character smoothly.
