Animation Evalutation

In my proposed ESting I wanted to create a whole battle scene rather than just focus on one individual character/object. My original idea was to have clay figures attacking a Lego castle and to have little Lego characters defending it. However when I began creating the set, i.e the castle and all the individual clay characters, I began to quickly realize I had bitten off a lot more than I could chew so to speak. In other words with the time pressures the scale of battle I wanted to create just wasn't possible. So half way into production I suddenly drastically switched ideas, opting to use inanimate objects of different colors/shapes, as warring factions instead. I ended up using pens vs pencils which worked well.


To exhibit my work and collect responses I first distributed my ESting video on social media services like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. From this I was then able to ask family and peers to take a survey I created on survey monkey. From these responses I was able to draw a wide range of conclusions and make a good evaluation on what I could of done differently. Here are the questions I asked and the responses I got.

  
To review my animation project and responses I decided to write a written report. First few questions I asked were to profile the people answering and find out what demographic groups I'm getting responses from. In total twelve people answered my survey. Out of the twelve who answered, all were students aged between 16-20, a third of which were female and the other two thirds male.

I then began to ask what they thought about the animation. My first question in this was to ask what genre they would class it as. Two thirds of the responses (8/12) classed it as comedy, a quarter of responses classed it as drama (3/12) and one person answered Sci-Fi. I was attempting more of a drama genre with the animation trying to make a tense battle scene, however being animation I can see why more people may class it as comedy. I think its very hard to create a ten second short animation and be able to define it as a specific genre with the content in that time. Comedy was the expected response.
                                                                                                             
My next question was a text box response I asked 'whats the biggest problem/error you can see?'. There were a range of answers, a couple including it being to short and having an unclear narrative, however having four people point out to me large frame drops in the middle five seconds in, and three people pointing out the sudden lighting change I can conclude these were definitely the two biggest errors in my animation.

Frame drops were due to me moving the objects quickly and not getting enough pictures in production which there's not too much you can do after, however the lighting could of definitely been changed through color correction in post production editing.



For my next question I asked them what might be their favorite aspect/element of the animation. I got a very wide range of answers here out of the twelve responses having offered a text box as response, however one that appeared three times was the fact it was clear to see what was happening and that I used larger pens for more 'important' characters giving them a sense of individuality.

My penultimate question was asking if they found the narrative of the animation clear. I offered three answers, yes, no and partially. 83% of respondents (10/12) answered yes and the other 16% (2/12) answered partially. I feel like I completed my objective of having clear differing factions looking at these responses, however I am concerned the two partial people may of just been being polite.


In my final question I asked their opinion whether they thought they frames in the animation ran smoothly because I was pretty confident it was noticeable and a fatal error in my work. The responses were close having four people putting no it wasn't smooth (33%) and eight people saying yes it was (66%) however since I know most people are going to be answering more politely than honestly I can definitely draw the conclusion the frames weren't smooth enough for at least four people to notice. To have improved this I could of spent longer in production and payed more attention to the rate I was moving the objects at. The survey responses were really useful and I was able to see a lot of clear improvements I can make in post production, and errors/mistakes to learn from in future projects.

Will making the Esting the biggest constraint I experienced was the time constraint. As explained, halfway through my initial production it suddenly became apparent my project was not realistic to complete with time and materials we had available to us. So I scrapped and completely changed my idea to something more realistic and do able. The other only real constraint was having to use a sound-clip given to us by the E4 website. It would of been really good to be able to choose/create our own however due to copyright reasons we only had a short selection we could choose from.

I managed my time very poorly throughout the project. Not only did I 'bite off more than I could chew' so to speak, I was also absent in key production lessons meaning I had to use my own time to complete the project to a passable standard. I'm not too irritated with myself for planning to big at the beginning though because that was just due to a lack of experience and knowledge in the field of animation production If I had realized this sooner and changed plan quicker I could of definitely ended up with a better result. I think I did however meet all the requirements of the E4 Esting brief. I created a child-friendly animated scene that lasts approximately ten seconds using the music provided by E4. It doesn't contain any offensive content, doesn't promote any sort of ideologies and is able to be shown before watershed.

I obtained all feedback for the project on surveymonkey.com, sending a questionnaire to a total of 12 correspondents. The general tone was positive, it was useful because when asking about mistakes/errors I would see the same thing pop up twice or more, so I knew instantly looking at the answers what improvements I can make and where I went wrong. I learnt a lot from this project, mainly how much patience it requires to create an animated scene however a lot of other useful skills such as post-production editing and creating physical animations (zoetrops, thaumatropes) etc.

I think I would be a suitable candidate for work within the media industry where working to a brief is commonplace because I now have developed a full understanding of what a brief involves and the type of things it may require from you. I understand in the creative media industry briefs will be used between two or more people working in the same project to come to the same conclusion and paint the best possible picture they can. Personally I wouldn't take animation further as a career choice mainly because I don't have the patience to maintain a production like that. Producing a real camera short your able to watch your footage as its recording and I'm definitely the sort of person that needs to see a payoff to stay motivated, where as with animation indiviudal frames are taken so until you load them onto a PC and put them in an editing software your unable to see how smooth you've made it run and how well its been put together.