Speaking with Animation

This animation was more time consuming than I have imagined. I want to be an animator when I graduate but going through this assignment, I feel like I do not have what it takes to make a full-length animated film. I did not enjoy this assignment as much as I thought. The reason is probably because I do not have a good experience with using Flash. This semester I took Game Programming, all we did was use ActionScript, and I did not get the hang of it and dropped the class. When the animation assignment was announced that we had to use Flash, I got nervous.

I do not have a good feeling about my animation. If I had more time I would probably make the process go a lot smoother with each branch from the tree growing according to the beat of the background music. I would also make the "newspapers" more realistic and pile them together instead of just having four figures. I had the most trouble writing the action for my button. I did it many time but an error kept showing. I was also frustrated because while making the animation, I kept getting a message saying that I am low on memory and I could not fix it. Overall, I think I'm just not familiar with Flash and get frustrated because I do not understand the program.

Production Notes

This video project was very exciting but intimidating at first. Although I took the class before Media 160, learning about how each angle work and how shots were made, I never actually held a camera to make a film. I also never used the program Final Cut until this project. We first drew up a storyboard indicating how we were going to shoot each scene, the story came to us without any complications. During the next class, we began shooting each scene that was indicated on the storyboard, and thankfully finished right on time before class ended. After filming, we sorted out which clips we needed and which clips we can delete. We then started editing the film during our free time, which is not a lot since we all work. While editing, we narrowed down the definite clips that we were using and started editing them. We had to cut each clips and tried putting them together so that it would flow smoothly. After the video editing, we put some background music to make the movie more effective. We had to play around with the music, making it play lower/higher.

Now that we finished the film, I wished we had more time to shoot some more scenes and edit the film to flow even better. In our film, there are still some cuts that you can see that were sketchy. I also wanted to film a scene where the main character walks to the bathroom after running down the stairs because we didn't have that transaction in our film, which ended up as a bad cut. Overall, I really liked how our film came out, the music fits perfectly and some classmates actually thought it was scary. In this project, the one important thing I've learned is that it takes a huge amount of time to edit films, but the outcome can be rewarding.