Audio
The process of our Animation
Over the last couple months, Jade and me had been producing a short animation of Schadenfreude by Avenue Q with visual illustration in the scenes. I am going to discuss the process of my animation what Jade and me had been working on. My role was to produce a 1-minute animation with music and characters singing along done using FireAlpaca and Flash Programs.
I started researching some music videos online. I found some really good inspirational videos on the website Youtube. We saw some good flash animations that worked smoothly with the song what people made on the website. We also decided to use our own characters in the animation. We decided to put 2 characters singing and moving along with the song we choose. We also decided to also add some funny scenes that audience may find very amusing.
Me and Jade decided to use the music Schadenfreude by Avenue Q because it inspired Jade first to draw out a storyboard and I helped her by adding some ideas when I heard the song afterwards. Once Jade completed the storyboard, I agreed on working on the animation. I used FireAlpaca to draw out the frames and then I imported them into Flash to animate them. The technique I used when I drew out the frame I duplicated to make some image movements quicker and also it is a faster processing way to save time. Also for shading, I duplicated the same layers and change the shading for next frame so I don’t have to keep shading the next frame.
I couldn’t draw directly in Flash because I’m not very good at it. When I experimented before I worked it in the proper animation. When I downloaded the music I imported it into Flash with the animation file on the new layer so I can sync the animation with music. I also edited the audio file to shorten it because we didn’t manage to complete all the scenes on the storyboard.
The characters are in an anime/manga style, which is a form of Japanese animation, in a more cutesy style known as 'Chibi'. We were going to have 2 of us working on the animation but it will be difficult because we both have different style in drawing the characters and scenes and it will confuse the audience when they watch the flash having 2 different styles. We also were going to put colours in each scenes but we didn’t have the time so we added shading instead and added some colours in the scenes to make it less boring. I also try to lips sync the characters with the words in some scenes to make the animation more interesting rather have still images.
This project turned out good, I wouldn’t say it was successful because the animation was not long, having more longer animation would make it more fun for the audience. If we had more me and Jade would have completed the storyboard and animation with the whole song and also we would try to colour the whole scene. I would practice more in drawing in Flash, and try out other tools that I haven’t get to test which hopefully make animation of higher quality in the future. I would also like to study further is the lip-syncing technique and movement animation to create better animation.
- Safiyah
