I was completely new to After Effects, or any digital media based animation software before this brief, so my knowledge and skills were incredibly limited, I feel though I have grasped the basic skills and understandings needed to create a successful animation as well as incorporating my own style of illustration and design into this smoothly. Although I feel I used the skills I gained effectively in conjunction with my animation, I wish I’d perhaps been a bit more ambitious with my animation ideas in the time given.
Researching into current digital media styles including animation allowed for a great amount of inspiration, especially when struggling with my ideas. My digital media blog was an important asset to research, or at least on screen based research and I soon began to use it as a valid tool within research, it was accessible and easy when searching videos, animations and screen based work to display and annotate.
My strengths were definitely the imagery of my work, I realised half way through and confirmed at the end of this module that I am not an animator, but I really enjoyed storyboarding my idea and putting it onto screen, successful or not, the storyboards I feel area definite strength of this project. I feel my online research including my blog was a strong point as a way of displaying my development and inspirations, especially when I could link my own animations alongside those of others in my research.
My weaknesses is my attention and patience when animating, thus taking from my animation. I found animation itself time consuming and a painstakingly slow process, I feel I work much better working at a fast pace, especially being used to creating images when drawing quickly, animation became the lesser enjoyed aspect of this project and in turn I feel this effected my outcome.
I would perhaps try to be more ambitious with my idea, but sensible still, understanding time constraints and how I can use my current knowledge to its full capacity.
I would also try and perhaps to put more stop motioning of my illustrations in, I used stop framing in the final transition of the animation as the healthy bacteria transforms, and I enjoyed being able to draw the transition on paper and place it successful and effectively onto screen.
If given the chance again, I feel perhaps I could attempt to work backwards, in the sense of choosing my sound initial and working my animation around the song, rather than finding the song towards the end then altering my animation to suit.
