Final animation evaluation - 

After making changes to my first major draft, and chopping it down by 10 seconds, I noticed some changes that needed to be made (which I talked about in my last post). In this version I have made the start less static by animating some of the words. This gives it more flow and I feel it fits pretty nicely with the music (1009 by Bonobo).

Overall I was really happy with my animation. I feel that it has a pretty strong graphical style and flows well throughout. I was most pleased with the segment with the gun made up of type, as well as the scene talking about life expectancy, as I felt these had the most originality and are the most aesthetically pleasing. My least favourite part is the ending as I feel its a bit cheesy and I was a bit rushed for time so I couldn’t make it more visually striking. 

I feel that on the whole the type has a fairly good balance throughout. I used two typefaces - Helvetica and Neou (a font downloaded from Dafont.com). They seem to work pretty well together and there wasn’t any particular sections that I felt looked put together clumsily.

I was aiming this animation at the general public and I think that the simplicity of it helps get across the message. However i’m not sure that the style particularly reflects ‘happiness’ at all. Its quite clinical and sterile, but i’m not sure this matters. Like I said I didn’t want it to come off too cheesy.

I stuck to my storyboard pretty loosely. Some areas I completely changed without re-storyboarding. This may have been a bad idea because if I took the time to draw out how it should look then i could have spent more time perfecting the animation. However I felt that using a storyboard too much felt to rigid. Some of the best parts of the animation came from just improvising and playing around with the ideas on screen. My storyboard was pretty good but it wasn’t as detailed as it could have been. 

If I was to do this project again I would spend more time creating thorough storyboards as I found that a lot of the time it was fairly improvised which made some parts take longer to animate. I would also try to keep it under a minute - this is a bit picky but its nice to keep it to the brief specification, and at the moment it clocks in at around 1.05. I could also be nice to introduce a few more graphical images such as the heart and the turbine near the start of the animation to keep things interesting.

After Effects tutorial today - learnt some basic techniques and played around with some of the video editing effects.

I refined the text on indesign, changing the fonts and sizes where needed. I then used the eye drop tool to sample on the red of the national literacy logo and accented some of the characters with it. I reduced the sized of the quotation marks as they looked a bit too big and clumsy on the previous design.

Overall I think the concept is strong but it doesn’t look as good aesthetically. If I had more time I would take the photo in a proper cinema with the correct lighting and use props (such as popcorn) as well as actors (so they’re not all students!). I feel that the compositional layout is pretty strong but the image is too dark. The darkness was an issue because it was hard to make it look like it was in a cinema, without making it dark. The colours are also still slightly saturated and unnatural on the people in the foreground, so this is also something to look out for next time. 

I decided to use this idea as a bookmark instead of a poster as it was originally going to be. This is because the vertical composition works well as a bookmark, and they could be given out like leaflets on the street. 

I designed the images on illustrator using the basic shapes and pen tools. I wanted to keep the images as simple and graphical as possible to communicate quickly with the viewer. This was also achieved with the single word text gradually getting bigger creating a snappy message. I experimented with different fonts and found that this worked well with the images as it was slightly heavier some of the others. The heaviness works well with the thick black lines of the images.

For my project I have decided to use the idea that people always say “the book is better than the film”. I played around with lots of ideas and found this idea worked well. Lights camera action is associated with film but the images add a different meaning to it. The action is quite positive, getting people to do something about it, rather than using figures and statistics which can be quite depressing (like only 1/6 people being able to read).

After sketching up some preliminary ideas in my sketch book using fairly graphical imagery, I began to draft them up as more refined drawings. I was very happy with the top image. I think the simple graphics along with the text work well and is the sort of look i’m going for. I also like the second one as it combines the elements to make a film camera which is quite clever. I’m less keen on the last image as its pretty messy and not as well considered.

The top book was probably my favourite. I made it much slimmer and smaller than the suggested guide lines and it has come out very professionally. The cover fits around the pages snuggly and it looks very sleek. It would be interesting to see how my drawing is affected by the different shapes and sizes of books. The top one for example, may lend itself to a single strip comic book, and the reader would turn the pages to view a long line of images. 

Last week we had book binding sessions. We had to make 7 different kinds of books, which each folded differently. We were given instructions on how to make them but I considered different sizes and types of card to make them more personal. 

A lot of trial and error was involved, pages often weren’t flush with the cover, sometimes the book wouldn’t close because the pages were too thick, the spines were too thick/ too small etc etc but most of these problems could be overcome with practice