......Production Analysis.......

Overall I am really happy with the outcome of my film. During advanced tech we had an opportunity to use flash, I really enjoyed this and it swayed my decision to try and make my final film in flash. I had never used this program before so I knew it was going to be a challenge but I wanted to give it a go and I thought the style I could create was exactly how I wanted my film to look.


I was happy with my final film but there are many things that I wanted to do that I did not had time to. I would have liked to use after effects to add to my piece, for example I wanted to add smoke around the house in the opening shot. I used a lot of minimal animation and I would have liked to do a more detailed piece. I was really happy with the music that was composed, it matched the animation and worked really well.


I feel there are many things I could and would have done differently, but I think the only reason I know this now is because I have been through this process and made the mistakes myself and learnt from them. It was the first time I had used flash so I found I was constantly learning and my skills were progressing the more time I spent on it, this was a really nice feeling and I am  really glad I pushed myself to do this film with a medium I had never used before. I really struggled at the start, I was the only one who was using flash and as I had never used it before I didn't really know how I was going to do anything. I couldn't find a starting point to get me going so I started just learning flash and seeing what I could do within the program and from this I progressed and managed to get on with my work.


It has definitely changed my view on flash animation, it was something I never liked and now I understand it I can appreciate it. From creating this film it has made me discover what sort of thing I want to do next year. I feel the piece I have created lacks personality and my artistic flare so next year I want to create something that really fits with my style. I have found this project has really opened my eyes and inspired me to keep progressing and made me want to experiment more and find new ways of expressing myself through my work.



Now that this project has finished I find myself already looking for something else to do. It has made me realise that this is what I want to do and I am sure that choosing the animation route was the right decision. I am really happy with the project that I have created this year and I have learnt a lot from it.

....finals....

After I had gone through these 42 scenes 4 times i had to do it once more. This time it wasnt so bad though, the bulk of the work had been done and i was checking the files and sizes and making sure there was nothiing i had left out. Sadly theres was one scene that was incomplete and i didnt have time to add more detail and refine the monsters and i didnt add detail to the boy.

I added the title sequence stuff to the beginning of my film, i didnt know all this had to be added at first but I got it all on there :) just had to add some frames to the beginning. I kept it simple and drew in the wirting I quite liked this style even though it was oringally meant to just be the rough.

I added  the night light in last I found this super hard and wasnt exact.y sure how I was gunna do it and was kinda making it up as I went along, turned out to be pretty easy afterall and I was happy with the final piece that was created. I would have liked to spent a bit more time on it and maybe had the lights streaming out of the night light but time was limited and I had to do what I could.

I had the final comic of Luke wooohoooo it was super awesome and I was realy happy with it. The colours and the designa dn the texture used all worked worked so well. I would have liked to manipulate the pages a bit more but didnt have time. Overall i was hapy with the outcome of the comic and I think it realy adds something to the film and helps the story massively to preogress.

I was still adding all the detail to the shots I was realy happy with the final look. The monster and the human characters worked really well together and they all worked with the backgrounds. I enjoyed shading the characters and do feel it was worth the time I spent just to give the film that extra detail.

...shading...

I had all the scenes to quite a high standard now and all the blocking was complete, I found the next part was the most time consuming ad tedious part of the film. I wanted to add shading to all the characters and some of the background stuff and add more detail, I underestimated how long this was going to take me. To my title sequence i added a more refined spider and added shading to the trees I was realy happy with the outcome.

I added the expressions to all the characters, the shading and the clothing detail, this took so long it was almost painful. I added the sahding to the clothes an on the hair. I liked the finish this gave my work though it realy makes a massive difference. I added a stream of light aswel, which was coming from the window.

I added shading work to all the characters, I found it worked quite effectively on the hero, the small detail with the belt and the buttons to their clothes makes a massive impact aswel. I had alot of fun creting silouette shadows, i wanted to put them throught more of my film but just didnt have time. I think the shadows worked realy well and create some depth within my work.

This is one of the final shots, I was realy happy with how this turned out, the lighting that amy added to the bakcgrounds worked so well. The character sit realy well with the backgrounds which im realy happy about. The small details and shaodows that i added made a massive impact on my piece and i could realy see the finshed piece beginning to come together.

...detailed blocking....

The next stage for my animation was to add more detail and start adding th symbols isntead of the roughs. I made symbol banks of all the parts of all the character in my film that I had got from the digital turnarounds Ihad previously made in flash.

I added hair to the characters and started adding the clothes, the clothes didnt have all the detail there stil missing the collar and the buttons and such. I added the hair and the ears and started drawing on a rough expression to see if it was working.

I started working on some of the harder shots, which honestly i had been avoiding but once i got stuck in and solidly worked on em for a bit i found it kinda fun and it wasn't as hard as i thought it would be. These still arent the final backgrounds that i planned to use. i started addign little details like his hands, and put the arms on as a slightly different colour so i could see them seperate from the body.

  Iwas working with luke to do the comic, it was alot of work and I knew it would be better to collaberate instead of trying to do the comic myself. i designed it with rough drawing then Luke took these images and created the final pieces at this stage the comic was still in the rough stage.

 I added the final symbols for the hero, i found once i got used to symbolling a character it started to become alot easier and less confusing, there were rather alot of layers involved in these flash files by the end it was quite crazy. I only gave him his basic outfit and still needed to go bak and add the collar and the belt to every frame. He also only had a rough expression so needed  to add that in the next run through.

.....lets start symbolling shall we...

ok  well now with this run through i started adding symbols to all the pieces, these were a rough cone shape as a head for the body and some drawn in body pieces and such. As you can see above i added the basic shape and size, then added rough line for where the ears eyes mouth and nose woyuld be.

I added rough coloured block to see where the body would be and the limbs. I added  the same amount of deatail on al the faces. I added the hands aswel to see where they would be places, all this was drawn stariaght into flash apart from the head.

I added the monster and started adding detail like under the hands and decided they were going to be shadow monsters becasue it fitted better with the story. I added rough outlines of the tteth to see if the shapes i had chosen were working.

I also added the details of the other characters int he story e.g the hero and the mum. I added more detail to the hero earlier on to make it easy to do the proper symbols in the next set of roughs. They still had no hair at the moment which made the characters loook quitye strange it was interesting to start to see the film takiung shape at this stage.

...the first draft....

Once I had my stock of characters, and had decided on my finished story I started animating on flash, saly im having probems getting my animatics to upload so I have had to pop up some stills from the progressive animatics. I decided I was going to go through the whole film complting it to a certain standard everytime so I could get everything finished to the same standard. my first run through was placing the most up to date background i had and popped rough aniamtion on top of these, the rough animation was just drawn straight into flash. I basically planned were everything was going to be the the duration of the scenes.

so i didnt get confused with the different parts of the animation i did them in different colours, i only added minimal detail, e.g the eye line and some mouth movement, i was concnetrating on the movement of the body, i did the blanket as a block colour to see what it would overlay.

the scene that had two colours were seperated by using different colours, all the characters had a small amount of detail added to them, the overlays also havnt been added as i was seeing were the charactaers and any abjects would be placed withing the scene.

...i left the monster as rough line work becuase I wasnt sure if they were going to be more like characters  or if i was goin to make them like shadows, i also figured out the positions of their mouths, and the placing of them in comparsion to the character they were interacting with.