Dot This was an interesting project which broke down into 3 parts, which I found unique as a structure. The dot exercise for me was a simple reminder that I can just get on with animating things and it isn’t necessary to plan out precisely every step of the way. I freestyled it a bit and I liked the result. What I took from this is how much I can do with simple objects and colours in animation. I would really like to approach small exercises like that in the future. Elements I first thought of doing a variety of elements instead of just one however I realised that it would be a better idea to focus on one element and do it good. I chose wind because it is very relevant to me;my hometown is a very windy place and I thought that by applying my personal experience to it the result will be better. The first layout that I did, I didn’t quite like the colours and how uninteresting it looked so I redesigned the background and the action that the character is doing. For the final final stage of it, I changed the colours slightly and I added the sun and moving clouds which I thought looked nice and made it more convincing. What I liked about this is that I was able to make some loops of wavy lines, a flag and finally the Colour me in With my group, we discussed a lot about what technique we could use. There was initially discussion about using ryso printing depending on the colours we would get. Because we got olive green,burgundy and lavender, colours that are used in ryso printing, we decided we could try out various techniques. We tried oil on glass animation with Marty and Stuti tried doing chalk but they weren’t satisfied with the results and they decided to do it digitally. I persisted with the analogue approach and chose watercolours. I liked the end result,especially since I didn’t do any pencil tests for the animation prior, however, I guess the movement could be improved for future projects. I learnt a few handy tricks for overlaying video footage on top of animation in after effects from a staff member which was great because I much rather prefer someone teaching me in the same room with me rather than going to youtube and watching video tutorials, which I have found that sometimes are overly complicated. It’s basically toggling the modes in the time line and choosing the luma matte mode and after that, tweaking the colours and the different modes to get a good result. Another thing that I implemented was colour correcting in premiere pro. I was able to colour correct very yellow-y murky footage ofmy watercolour animation on paper to a very distinguishable and white background where the green and the red were very visible. All in all I learnt very valuable things that still come in handy to this day.
