Story Animation Analysis

The scope of this project was to create an animation that had a story with a beginning, middle, and end, along with three scene or camera changes. We were asked to use all of our prior knowledge, which would be arcs, a walk-cycle, timing, puppet pin tools, multi-plane, and keyframes.

Though, I didn't finish the project, I did work incredibly hard on it. The pre-production was the simplest to me. All I did was somehow create a character, I chose a deer, and make it go on some sort of adventure, this adventure could have a moral, or not. Mine did not. I was told that my story seemed a lot like Bambi, but I didn't think they were similar. I used an art prompt as an idea for my animation. I believe the art prompt was "A deer lost in a forest", and I based my work on that single sentence. I first had to create a story though, which was pretty simple, with that prompt. I just thought of reasons why a deer would become lost in a forest, and soon enough, I had a long list of reasons. Though, I eliminated the ones that I deemed too complicated or too bland. I tried to create a list of reasons that would be doable in the span of time that we had. I chose the reason that the deer had followed a butterfly into the forest.


The storyboarding was easy when I had the concept the think back on. All I had to do was draw the concept on paper. Which, when creating a small animation, was incredibly simple. Though, I did need to design the characters that were in the animation, which wasn't as bad as it is usually made out to be, for me anyway. Making the animation wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be. I had everything planned out, though I couldn't quite get what I wanted when I was creating it. So, I didn't get to the editing part. Though, I did try animate the butterfly that the deer was following, and it didn't quite work out the way I wanted it to.

I learned how hard animation can be when you don't take notes in class and almost forgot how to animate anything. Though, I did get more of a grip on how to work Photoshop, and how to animate in photoshop. As well as animating in After Effects, though I am not all that good at it. I still learned a bit about it. For instance, I learned how to make a subject move from one side of the screen to the other in After Effects. I also learned how to put the puppet pin tools on the subject and make only certain parts of the drawing move.

Professionally, I need to work on my project deadlines. I know I'm not the best at keeping up with deadlines, but that's mostly because I stress myself out too much and I try to put too much on my plate. Which is more than I can handle. I wish I could have enough time to finish my animation, instead of just getting a quarter of it done. I think the only thing I would do the same was keep my story the same and the drawings I had done the same. I believe I could use my experiences of Photoshop and a bit of After Effects to make a simpler and done animation next time around.