Animation Planning, Process, and Evaluation

 PLANNING

I had the original idea for this animation over the summer, and decided to start planning, the main idea at the time was to have these images that flowed into each other, drawing all of it on illustrator and then finding a way to animate it. As you can see the original plan was actually quite similar to the final outcome, except for rather than the skull turning it just zooms in. I also decided to have the flower on the black background rather than white, as it flowed better as a transition. I was also going to have a baby in the womb as the transition into the seed at the end for the loop, and while I did end up making the digital drawing for it and put it into animate, it didn't quite fit with how I wanted it to flow, and didn't really match the animation style I was working with. 

The first attempt at this animation was very time consuming for no reason, and also would not have worked beyond the small bit I got done. I started with three images that I drew on illustrator, the pomegranate, skull, and the flowers blooming, these were based of of photos I found online. 

After finding a tutorial about animating on illustrator, I tried it. This included copying the same file and moving it over, then exporting them individually, then putting all those separate frames into premier and trying to shorten them the right amount. If you think this sounds unnecessarily complicated, you're right. While this definitely works for animations with only a few frames, it was not the right approach for this long form animation. This didn't last very long, and I ended up deleting most of these files, because they were just taking up too much space. 

one of four separate files 

These images would then be the ones that I'd use as the reference for the final animation as well. When this was taking so long I decided to try and find another way of doing it. In my first research stage I'd also looked into Adobe After Effects, but looking at the workflow I just found it too much to try and learn for now. In high school I'd done some short form animation using photoshop and layers, but these were only 3-4 frames, and while I know that actually might have worked since photoshop has a small video function, I didn't decide to try that again. 

This animation was then abandoned until the school year started, and as mentioned in previous blog posts I'd started to try small animations to go into my title sequence and future work. After doing these basic animation lessons online and understanding the process of using Adobe Animate more, I decided to bring back the idea for this animation as the theme or morphing and distortion is pretty integral to my final project. A musician I've worked with before sent me the song I ended up using, and I thought they'd both match quite well.

PROCESS

After doing some more research, I decided to go with frame by frame animation on adobe animate. I only knew two main things I wanted: 1.for all the frames to be hand drawn 2.for it to be able to play on a loop.

I started with the pomegranate. I adduced to have key frames and work my way from the middle out, moving the pomegranate by hand. I liked how jumpy it was, as it made the handmade animation aspect quite obvious, I then did the same for the skull, and just traced the different flowers blooming. Then I made the transition between the pomegranate and skull. I had spent ages trying to figure out how this transition would look, and when it eventually came to me I knew it would take a while. Overall that transition (15 frames) took me 6 hours of animation. Once I saw it fully done I hadn't anticipated how smooth it would look. This made the rest of the animation look far less refined. After seeing this I decided to keep the choppiness of the pomegranate, partially because it had taken so long; and partially because I knew I might reuse this as a motif later on. For the skull I decided to put a motion tween onto the layer that guided my drawing, and draw over that. Somewhere in the process this layer became a bit uneven, so the end of the transition looks choppier. Honestly I don't mind it, since the flower part that comes right after is choppy on purpose, so I think this makes it less jarring. 

I did a similar motion tween for the flower, and tried expanding the lines to create the white background again, in the end it looked slightly different than I had imagined. I'd originally intended for it to look more like the black lines in the centre of the flower were morphing into the pomegranate, but the final result ended up looking more like revealing it from the background. Despite this, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. 

That was the process for the black and white version. To make the file compatible with the found footage I had to make some changes. I went back through every frame and filled in the lines so that they had no gaps, and would allow me to fill that area with color and leave others with nothing, so I could export it as an alpha file with no background on the parts I'd left blank. This then allowed me to take some footage (this time I used free for use from Pexels) on the layer below. The only part where I used a different approach was the flower, where I used a blend mode that made it take over the background, and transitioned from the black background to it being in color. My original plan for that was the found footage being in the flowers lines itself, but ultimately I decided that for this version it may look too subtle. 

EVALUATION

The first point I have to make when evaluating this technique is definitely time. Overall this animation took me around 30 hours of work, and while I'm very happy with the result, I will have to include this as a consideration when discussing the feasibility of my final project. While this was very time consuming, my final film is not a 20 minute frame by frame animated film, but a live action film which includes some animation within it to accompany the feelings and distortions of reality I'm trying to portray. For example, the small animation of the paper feeling off the wall in my title sequence took me around 20 minutes, not including the masking later on in premier pro. Having now experimented with several approaches to this kind of short form animation, and now with one larger scale project, I feel like my skills have developed significantly, which will make these shorter form animations easier and more efficient, and now I can decide where these more complex forms of animation will be effective and where they won't. 

My main goal for this animation was to explore distortion and morphing, and while I'm happy with how this was achieved I will be doing more academic research on this and how it could be more effective in my work, as well as what effect this has in terms of my own goals for haptic visuality. 

The second version of this animation includes found footage, and as I mentioned before this was achieved through filling in certain parts of the animation and leaving others blank. Looking at this version I'm very happy with how the background for the flower looks, but looking at the pomegranate, I wish I'd left the background of this transparent as well, since you can't really see the movement through the seeds and its just looks a bit bare compared to the rest of the video. I'm still deciding how I feel about the background for the skull, but I feel like this could definitely be improved on. I have plans to make a version 3 implementing all of these changes. Since this will require going back and filling in each frame in a different way, and I'm currently working on other videos to include in my portfolio, this will probably have to wait until after submission, but I'm looking forward to seeing how that will look.