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.

Starting to animate parts of my storyboard. I chose a part that I was interested in and tried to bring it to life. The statistic is to do with Costa Rica and their energy usage. I’m still struggling to get comfortable with after effects, but I feel like I’m starting to get to grips with it. 

I used a simple graphical style by building my images up on illustrator and then transferred them to After Effects. I like the windmill and the way I used the camera to pan down to a plug. The lightning bolt was built up on a separate composition and looped before being moved back into the project. I’m not to happy with the type at all however. It is a bit safe and boring, and the 99% font is not working at all. I quite like the colour scheme - a simple block colour helps the icon style graphics pop out.

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