Evaluation wip

Video link ;   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVFT2cpixg8

Our group animation is finally complete!

The animation, involving personified beer glasses and objects centres on exploiting these typical drink traits into parts of their characters.

The process of the animation has been long and arduous. As the animation has gone on for so long and without much direct consistent direction, it was even harder.

My group consists myself, and 3 others.

The scenes/animation parts i did are these parts;

• The scene layouts of the first, 2nd and 4th scene with the Guiness + Beer.
• I animated/hand drew each frame of the Beer's facial expressions.
• I animated the cocktail in the beer/Guiness scene.
• I placed all the objects within those scenes mentioned involving the Beer/Guiness.
• I drew up most of the original storyboard for the project.
• I drew most of the concept art/expression work for the characters.
• I did the prototyped animations for the project.

The main problem with this group animation was the lack of communication. Whilst when we first began the project, we were all on-board and eager, that motivation soon dwindled. Most of the story and animation substance was established in the first 2 weeks of the project starting. It was initially decided that the animation would consist of the beer and Guinness, starting off as the final animation does. They would get drunk and become drunk themselves. The Beer would eventually come across a cocktail, as he does in the final, and then a Fly which annoys him to no end, eventually drowning inside the glass. The fly is then drunk in a transition. Then the beer, now drunk considerably, would hallucinate a robot which drives him nuts. This would cause him to fall off the beer counter and smash, similarly to how the final animation ends.

As i said, the motivation dwindled by certain members of the group. We have a Facebook group for communication, but for most of the time, i was the only one who communicated effectively or initiated most of the conversation. I was therefore not particularly pleased to be doing most of the work. I constantly prompted and asked for some members to start something, but it took a very long while for anything to be done.

I felt that one member in particular held the group back the most, as instead of following the tide and flow of the group, that person became a dam instead, which left the water log of ideas to overflow, break the banks and become the animation it is now, without much plan to stick to. It soon came to the fact that now the other two characters were having their own animated instance.

Feedback from the group was lacklustre, and so we only had my own concepts to go on from. There was this ever present 'void' within the project, where it felt all i said fell into it, and so, there came a point, only a few weeks away from deadline where i made my move and initiated the first scene of the animation, deviating from the storyboard to produce something we could go on from, the first scene you see. However, because i was essentially tackling this all myself, i had to drop the fly scene, because i simply couldn't do all this workload along with my other projects.

Eventually some work was done, in which two members of the group recorded the background for the animation, footage of the bar to use.

It seems that the ever present deadline, that soon leered a lot closer, was the final kick for them to start, although one in particular continued to moan.  The creation of the animation has been cut very close - borderline hours before the deadline. Something which simply could have been avoided if certain individuals got into gear and had acted when i had.

The actual animation itself however, i am pleased with what i had produced to contribute to it. I have never done such a long, hand drawn flash animation before, so it was a great learning curve and experience for me to produce one. It took a great deal of time, and the reference to the storyboard was incredibly helpful in key-framing the animation and knowing when to do what. In case i needed to change anything either, combined with my prior knowledge to Flash, i was able to set up and produce the animation in a way that if i wanted to change anything, i could swap things very easily. I made sure to symbol certain parts of the animation for easy substitution, such as the bodies of the glasses and characters. This was especially helpful later on - when we decided to change the cartoon drawn glasses to real-life glasses. This meant that i didn't have to individually change each and every single frame of the animation.

Unfortunately, I'd assume to my own haste, i didn't alter the resolution of the canvas i would animate to. It was far too late to change this when i started the animation. If i had to change it, i would have had to resize each frame. If i did change the canvas size for another scene it would have meant that the scenes would not have been consistent, one at a higher resolution and quality than the other. For this reason, i kept the resolution the same.

Despite this, i am still incredibly happy with the outcome of the animation as, as i had said, not only was it a challenge, but the actual smooth sailing of the animation is great. The Beer's expressions flow very well due to the amount of consistency in frames.

Because of this, i still remain happy with my contribution to the film and the quality of it i have produced.