This is my evaluation for my 2D Animation, which you can view here.
My assignment asked me to “look further into the history of animation and the key developments that took place over time. You will explore different methods of creating 2D animation, from traditional, hand drawn animation to a completely digital process. You will then be asked to design and create your own 2D animation with sound. You final video should be rendered as a QuickTime movie or using the H.264 codec so it can be posted to Tumblr. “
My idea was to animate a short section from a youtube video, where 2 spies break into a facility, where they think they silently take out one of the guards. Then, the alarm goes off. I wanted to animate this as it seemed like quite a comic moment, and I felt that trying to lip-sync the majority of the clip would be a good challenge for myself.
The software that I used to create this animation was a combination of 3: Photoshop, for the background, as I preferred editing already existing images in that, Illustrator to create the characters, as I liked the fact that the default brush made the lines a lot cleaner and smoother than if I used the brush in photoshop, and After Effects to edit everything together.
One of the things that went wrong whilst editing the animation in after effects was that when the first spy goes to take down, the spy would either move too quickly, too fast or end up moving too late in relation to when the guard fell. To fix this, I zoomed in quite far on the timeline and animated every 5 frames or so, just to make the movement smoother and more logical.
If I could do it again, I would add more detail to the lip-syncing. This is after somebody pointed out some very interesting things about where people are looking during the clip in my feedback.
Overall, I feel that the animation went fairly well. There were a couple of things that, looking back, I could have done better, but I do feel that I did quite well, as this was only my third time using After Effects to animate something.
FEEDBACK
The audio was very clear and volume levels were well balanced. I thought the beginning was a little confusing with 2 different voices and only one character in the frame. Some facial expressions or close up shots could have emphasised the emotions and reactions of each character.
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At first I was a bit confused as to what was going on. The audio was good and very clear and you can see that you put a lot of effort into trying the lip-syncing. A good first attempt.
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You could have had more detail when lip-syncing, maybe an extra 4 mouth shapes? Look at the Disney Workshop videos for help/ Remember, what will the audience be looking at, quite often they will only focus on one thing that is on screen, in this case the mouth of the person on-screen, talking, so try to focus on that. The storyline was a little bit confusing, you could make a sound to indicate there is someone else talking at the same time, perhaps modulate one of the voices to make it sound like it is coming in through a radio? Another way you could have differentiated between the 2 characters is by changing their looks slightly, maybe giving one of them a badge or changing the colour scheme on their clothing.
