Reflecting on Development

My animation has gone through many changes and developments throughout this course, all of which have helped me create my final 120 second animation sequence.

Between the first assessment and the second assessment, the main change that I made to my animation was to switch from using Flash to After Effects to create my animation. I feel that After Effects was the easier application to use to create a more detailed and professional looking animation sequence.

While I was using Flash for my first assessment, I was using block  colours for my characters and backgrounds, which limited the amount of depth and detail I could give to these elements. I also found it difficult to animate accurately, and feel that Flash would be a good programme to use for more basic animations.

Once I switched to animating in After Effects, I was able to use repeated scenes and animations throughout my main sequence, which were also still fairly detailed. I was also able to use lighting and shadow, which I enjoyed experimenting with and creating interesting effects. One of the most useful parts of animating using After Effects was that I was able to use character rigging to animate my characters easel and accurately, which saved me a lot of time in the long run.

Originally I was planing on recording voices and conversation for my characters, however I soon realised that this would take up a lot of time, both to record the sounds and the time it would add on to my animated sequence as a whole. 
Instead I decided to only use a couple of short voiced pauses, such as sighs and laughs, from a creative commons free sound website. Not only did this speed up my working process, but I feel it also simplified my animation a little, and made it easier for the audience to engage with my characters and their actions.