Creative Design Practice: Update #3

I have now officially completed four scenes for this animation. If I am being honest, when I started it I was not sure how good it would turn out. I only have minimal experience in animation, every scene that I do a lot of the times I am doing it for the first time. Not that first times scare me, in fact I think they excite me. I enjoy the fear of working on something for over ten hours, not knowing if it is going to turn out exactly how I envisioned it before I started working on it.

One thing that this project made me realise, is that I need to work on my planning skills. A lot of the times I have a vision of the scene I want, and in my head, I have a complete crystal-clear image of it, but I fail to put it down on paper first. Experiment with it, make sure the composition of the scene is the best I could produce, lay down a colour palette and make sure every element of the image works well together. Looking at other animator and even illustrators work, I do notice that if there is one thing about it, is that their composition and colour scheme is concise.

Though, I think for the first time, I was able to understand the concept of distance and how to work out colour values to make it look like distance. Something that I previously failed while I was attempting to do one scene for this animation. In all fairness, it was a scene that I had done before the storyboard which would have no place in the story now, but I do still want to revisit it one day to figure out exactly what went wrong with it and how I can make it work better. And… I do want to want to animate a waterfall just for the fun. I did it to try to loosen up, so I do not regret the time I spent on it. Even if there is absolutely nothing about it that I like anymore.

Here are the completed scenes for my short story animation:

The last two are likely my favourite. The first one, while I do love it, especially the pastel colours of the sky, there is still something not quite right with the composition. The last one was the one that took me the most time, but also one that I am most proud of. Until this moment, I had not really delved into character animation, I always tend to make my characters move minimally because I am intimidated by it but it worked quite well in this scene so I am very happy with it.