Evaluation

My chosen brief was to make a piece advertising the National Trust, the brief was asking for pieces of work that was aimed at the more mature audience (25 and up). I did a lot of mind mapping in order to come up with ideas. I wanted to link this piece of work with what I want to do in the future, Animations. After all the mind mapping I finally came up with an idea that shows the National Trust for the buildings that they have renovated and for the habitats that they have saved for the inhabitants (animals). My idea consists of animated animals running through each setting of the renovated houses and the protected pieces of lands. I first wanted to keep it more simple with just one animal running through each setting, the animal I chose to do originally was just a simple rabbit. I then had a talk with Mike Smith and he believed it would work much better if there was a variety of animals and I thought so too. I attempted to do a fox but that was much too complicated to animate each sprite with the time I had.
I then started to research what other wild animals live in these sort of areas. The results came up with squirrels, rabbits, hedgehogs, birds, foxes and deers. I drew many sprite sheets of squirrels,hedgehogs, birds and rabbits. I also attempted to do a deer but like the fox this was too difficult with the time I had. The birds, squirrels, hedgehogs and rabbits turn out very well with fluent movements. I am quite proud with how they turned out especially with it being my first time creating hand drawn animations. Each setting that I chose had to be a certain size in order for them to work together. I had a lot of problems in finding the right sizes to fit the animations on. Once I found the perfect images, with the correct sizes, I then came across more problems like the images that I collected was to still and didn't have any movements in them, obviously because they were photographs. I then had to try and come up with a way of creating wind, rain and snow. It was easy to make rain in after effects by creating a stimulation on the images chosen. It was the same for snow, these worked very well. However for the wind it was much more difficult. On a previous module Annabeth showed how to create a mesh warp in order to create grass movements in the wind. I tried this for the still images, however this didn't work as well as I thought it would the movements weren't as fluent as they was in the previous module, this may be due to the previous module just animating grass whereas this brief had more trees and bushes rather than grass. I didn't like the way it turned out. I attempted to create less movements and slower movements. This was much better than before but it still looked a bit odd. Due to time restrictions, I didn't have enough time to change it anymore so I left it the way it was, with more time I believe I could have change it for the better. 
For me to make my sprites more colourful and match up with the settings more, I had to redraw them in Photoshop. I experimented with colour a bit in order to find the right colours and make them match up more. I found that browns worked better for the animals. I used various shades of browns to give them different details. For me to animate the sprites I saved out each image separately, making sure I named them correctly e.g. RabbitRF01 meaning Rabbit Running Forwards image 1. I did this for each separate image, this took a lot of time to do. Before saving out each image I made a GIFF file format to show the animations working this meant that if something wasn't quite right I could change it much easier. I did encounter some problems, like working out how far to move the images across from each other, to give more fluent movements. This meant I had to experiment a lot in using the timeline in Photoshop in order to find the right distance to move them across. When I saved out each image I made sure that the background was a green colour, this meant that in After effects I could key light the background out easier, I did try to save the images out with transparent backgrounds but it didn't work for some reason, so to save me time I just painted the background green. With more time I believe I could have made it much better, like perfecting the wind simulations and creating bigger and more animals. I would have also had more time to create better sprites with smoother movements. I think that I managed my time wisely compared to the past where I haven’t. I believe I have managed it wisely as in my original plans I was only going to create one rabbit but I managed to create many more with different angles. I could have researched and experimented better as I didn't experiment loads I only did a few experiments. My research was also only an overview of what was there I could have gone into it more deeper and found out other things. Due to the deadline for entering the competition changing, I wasn't able to enter which is a real shame as I would have loved to enter and get my work out there to be judged. Next time I will keep track more in order to be able to enter and to find out when changes are made early on rather than a day in advance. 
Overall I believe it was a success, and I am really proud of what I managed to achieve with it being my first time creating drawn animation. I would definitely do it again as I really enjoyed making it.