Yr 1 Martha Hay Animation Elective Journal

The most surprising thing about my attempts at animation were the final results. I was often surprised at the results because they would appear differently to how I imagined it to look. For example, for the ‘two balls project’, I had mapped out a sequence with one heavy bowling ball, and one light beach ball to be rolling/ dropped next to each other. However, once the sequence was finished the beach ball seemed to have more weight than the bowling ball due to the speed in which it fell and bounced.

The majority of my time spent on these projects involved either filming, drawing or tracing. To begin my project I would plan and research what to animate. Once I had decided I would either use found footage, on YouTube for example of a bowling ball, or I would film the action myself. From here I would then choose around 20-40 stills from the action, depending on how much movement there was and screenshot these. I would then trace these stills, scan the drawings and put it together. So the majority of my time was spent drawing.

What I found difficult about the tasks set was similar to what I found most surprising about my animation, which was the animations not turning out how I expected them to turn out. I would find it very difficult to go back through my drawings and make edits and changes to make the animation flow, without starting the entire process again from the beginning.

To make my animations, I found a lot of moving object references on YouTube, to see the details of how things moved, for example the stretch and squish of a ball when it hits the ground. I also have some close friends that do animation who showed me previous examples of their work, and they explained the process of how they animate. I keep a record of my favourite and most interesting animated short films and clips to come back to for reference and inspiration.

As a Film and TV student I found the research process most interesting, being able to watch and apricate these artists work. I enjoy the creative process but as I’m new to animation I struggled to get to grips with it, as I am most used to making live action shorts.

I can definitely see an improvement in my work from the first project, but if I were to do these projects again, I would try more digital animation. I have trying to teach myself Adobe Animate, but currently trust my tracing method more than my IT skills.