Task 3 | My Website-Year2

Creating the animation

The reason I'm choosing to animate rather than create a documentary style film or record myself directly speaking, is because I want to practice animating as much as i possibly can, since I plan to continue it on to university and pursue a career in it as well. Hopefully this short task will give me some more experience in animating as well as material for my portfolio.

Script for the project:

After completing the first year of the course, I’ve decided that once I finish the second year, I want to move on further and go to university. Wanting to widen my options, I have already researched a number of universities, not limiting myself to the UK either. Having looked at degree courses in VFX, 3D and 2D animation, I’ve decided that I want to do a BA that’s specifically for 2D animation.

Last year, I explored animation really for the first time, creating different pieces for projects and then settling on using animation for my FMP. Despite how tedious it can be, I really enjoyed the creative and free reign aspect of it, therefore want to carry it on even after this course and peruse a career in it too. Other animators works have really inspired me too, including concepts of characters, rough AMVs, sketch based animations and mainstream cartoons as well.

As far as weaknesses go, I know that not only my motivation for projects is an issue, but also my keeping of time too. During my FMP, the real main problem I faced was getting the different aspects of my project finished in time to move onto the next one. I hope that with my future projects I can fix this and complete my projects within a good timescale to a good quality too.

So far, there are three universities that I am looking to apply to. Ravensbourne in London, SVA and Pratt Institute which are both in New York. They all offer degree courses in animation and all require a portfolio to be shown too. I have already looked at the pros and cons of these universities as well as the finance side as well as the strengths to going to these universities too, covered in my SWOT analysis. There isn’t much difference between the courses aside from the fact that some cover more types of animation rather than just 2D, and so on, however 2D animation is what I want to pursue a career in, in the future.

Other alternatives to university would be perhaps apprenticeships of immediate work placement, however I don’t think those are the routes I’m going to take since a large amount of animators today have degrees, and the number is only increasing. Not only that, but I’d prefer to learn as much as I could before immediately going into a job that I don’t have much experience in yet.

So, overall, I am looking to go to a university after I finish my second year at Colchester Institute, and go into a course that will give me a degree in 2D animation.

Assets:

For my animation, I will need different images and other assets to come in on the timeline as I talk about them. I will most probably bring in screenshots of my website that I'll highlight since my script includes some of the things that I've talked about on here, under other tasks.

What I Will Be Doing:

Since I am creating an animation for my project, I will most likely be using Adobe Animate since it is the most familiar program to be, and it wouldn't be a smart idea to use a program I didn't know to create an animation in the small time space that I have. And again, one of my weaknesses I highlighted was time keeping, so I'm going to be really careful in regards to that.

After recording my audio, which will be me reading my script, I will take the audio into adobe animate and create an animation that fits up to the audio. Once it has been created, I will export it into either After Effects or Premiere pro where I can edit it and put in all the assets. When the assets have been put in I will export the final video and evaluate my project as a whole.

Why exporting didn't work at first:

have completed my animation and edited it as well as added aspects, however, I cannot export it yet since three of the images apart of my assets, are saved on my memory stick and wont load into the sequence timeline until I get them off of my memory stick which is not currently at hand. Not only that, but some of the sound effects aren’t currently working. Hopefully when I export my sequence within a newer version of Premiere Pro, they will go back to normal.

Update: I managed to find a way to export my final piece regardless, and while the visuals look distorted for some reason, and three or so assets are missing, here is pretty much the project outcome. As soon as I can replace the missing assets, I will do so and re-export my clip. After that, I'll upload it to YouTube properly.

The final export:

After fixing the issues with the assets, here is the finished product: