Reflective Statement

The collaboration was a success in some parts although if I hadn’t procrastinated a little, I would have done more work than what I have, which is a lesson learnt. I think what resorted to procrastination was knowing the amount of work that was supposed to be put in, as it was easier to visualise than doing it. Overall, our ideas were strong and headed the right direction.

Fig.1 - Scene 1 Iron Moom and Machine Moom

Animating was easier than I anticipated as I was able to complete a scene in one day. Since I did not freeze the keyframes when creating a pose, I got carried away in animating into the animation which made the job easier. I then went further into posing in each keyframe to make it flued and believable.

Fig.2 - Scene 5 Ant Moom and Black Moomther

The “pose to pose” technique is a little more visible in scene 5 mostly on ‘Ant-man’ who is laughing hysterically. I would say animating got harder when you got into it as there were many things to animate when going into detail to produce something in good quality, mostly when coming to facial expressions and fingers.

Using the graph editor was one of the hardest things to do most when presenting it to the group and retouching the scene which then disturbs the graph. Cleaning and cleaning the animation repeatedly was, in my opinion, one of the most time-consuming things in the project. This is because having a deadline means working faster and forgetting or leaving some of the keys untouched making some of the movement inflexible. What I would do differently is animate everything how it should be and use one of the days in the week just for cleaning the graph editor and panic less.

Fig.3 - Creation of Namina

When I came up with this name “Namina” I had an image in my head on how the title would look like, which was; space-themed, stars all over the place, astronomical, celestial and more. I and my group made a list of what and how this Studio name would look like and how it would be presented. When I was done with After effects, I used Adobe Premiere for the sounds. I mixed sounds together such as space, choir and magical sounds, which we all thought was great. I would admit doing the animatic was exhausting and tiring which was one of the most reasons I procrastinated however got over it and pushed myself even though there were a lot of technical difficulties which would make you want to give up.

After effects was hard to use, however looking through some tutorials my knowledge came back and learnt something new along the way. The hardest part was trying to find the right image and creating different photoshop files for every scene, as after effect’s numeric/ alphabetic were not reliable at times. What I would do differently is do the easy work first before diving into the work and tackling the hardest parts. Overall the animatic went well and the sounds for the opening theme was great, “cheesy” and appreciated in the group.

Fig. 4 - Storyboarding

Storyboarding was, in my opinion, one of the hardest in the project as there were so many characters to draw and I focused too much on the quality and detail, which made it even harder for me. In the end, I had to stop thinking too much and draw them as fast as I could for the group. When doing the Storyboard, I realised how crucial it was when animating as they give a rough idea of the key poses in Maya. Overall, I am happy with this process because it made me realise, I have to be more familiar with photoshop and be less scared in making mistakes when drawing. In the end, my group was able to use my storyboard for the poses (videos) and animation.