Evaluation Report
My understanding, this module was about introducing ourselves to sound and to recognise how sound plays a big part into the film. As I use to study Graphics design, I never really looked into creating my own sound or how sound helps to create the story along with the visuals because of the music or sound effects used. I learnt that not all sound has been reordered along with the visuals and that some has been made after the production to give an emphasis on something that we see or that may happen in the background which could play a big part in the movie, for example a gunshot going off even though we may not see it happen.
After being introduced to this project I had really big plans, because of the fact I am a huge fan of the author Darren Shan. A film was created for some of his books and I was really disappointed with this film as it didn’t carry the story as the books did. After seeing this film, I’ve always hoped that they would recreate a better version or create better movies for his other books and I liked to visualise in my head what these would turn out like. So because of this, obviously my first thought was to create a scene from one of his books. However, this changed when we were told that we are not to create a direct interpretation of our text and that I couldn’t create something ambitious and something so big in the time scale which I had, seeing as his books are about demons, magic and pretty much the world being taken over and exploding. Realising this, I simply just used the idea of going to the library, picking out a random book and a random text from the book. This turned out to be about U.F.O’s which is something I’ve never been big on and have never been a fan of Sci-fi films because of how unrealistic they are and I could just never get into the films. On the other hand, I do like animations and cartoons about aliens because I feel that when watching a cartoon or animation anything is possible as this isn’t part of a real world, so I went with this idea and decided to give it a go. I also realised that with aliens I could introduce some weird sounds and be very experimental with sound, also with the technical side and getting to use new software’s which could become very handy in the future.
With my animation I do realise that this still has a direct interpretation of the text, however I did involve a slight twist to the story, and made this present tense and the idea of using aliens, rather than this being a past tense thing with humans, because who says we aren’t the aliens to other living being on another planet? Once I explained my idea to a student they suggested for me to watch a Tristar Pictures production, Planet 51. This is an animation about what we call aliens having a human land on their planet who they call the alien. I realised how this has a slightly similar story to my animation so I watched this for more ideas and it was actually quiet useful.
For my animation I decided to animate using Photoshop because this is something I am familiar with. I did debate wither I should use Flash and develop my knowledge after my first project I did using Flash, however I did lean more towards Photoshop because I liked the style of pens which I could use to draw out my characters with and how the shadows would blend in and the lights would give off a better glow and from my understanding, Flash uses vector graphics which I find to be my weakness when coming to blending. Saying this, I also had a lot of fun learning how to use ToonBoom, however as we did workshops on this late into the project I didn’t believe that I could pull off a whole animation with 2 weeks’ time remaining, so this is something I would like to get better at in my own time. Nevertheless, I am pleased with how my animation turned out, I do believe that it could have been a lot better but I wanted to leave loads of time for trying to create sound. I also made a mistake in animating because in the first 100 frames I feel like that I made too many movements and I thought that there should be many changes with every frame, but I found this to just make you lose focus on the person which you are meant to focus on, this was also very time consuming as I felt the need to make many changes in each frame, but then I did learn from this and I sorted this out later on in the animation and I do see that it runs a little smoother.
Now talking about sound. I enjoyed this so much learning about sound and also seeing voice actor Marc Silk. As this was my first time working with creating sounds, I wanted to get really experimental and create sound which were uncomfortable to listen too. I decided that I should have some sounds going up to the 100% decibels in adobe Audition because of how we learnt that this shouldn’t be done as the sounds get distorted, but this is the effect I wanted to gain and I believe I did do so. I didn’t want to do this for all sounds but I wanted to experiment with this just on some parts of the animation so that if the volume is on loud we wouldn’t have much issue listening to the sounds I made but I did want parts that went really high and would make the viewers react. From this experience I would like to learn and to experiment with more natural sounds, as I did in some of the mini tasks. Overall I am happy with what I produced, although I do understand that visually this could have been better and as for the sound I will just have to wait to see if I get the reaction which I expect to.
Sabba Kassim