I See Faces - Final Evaluation

At the beginning of this brief, I found it very difficult to get motivated because I knew character design is something I would struggle with. I found that a lot of my initial character ideas were based around humans and I wanted to move away from this because I felt it was very generic and uninteresting. Once I had a few ideas to work with, my motivation picked up during the development stage, I got stuck in to progressing with these characters and seeing how they could be animated. Drawing the same thing over and over again really helped me with my characters, especially the dog as I got used to a way of drawing it which helped me keep the figure similar in each of the frames. Storyboarding was so valuable during this brief because it helped me to figure out in my head how the character was going to move and how I could make these short animations loop and repeat. I think this was most beneficial in the pepper gif as this was the one which was most challenging to think of a way to make the start and end frame the same. 

I really enjoyed the mono printing workshop and I am pleased I managed to incorporate a print into one of my final gifs. I think its a really quick way of building up a body of interesting images and although I don't feel I used the time to my full advantage this time, it is something I would definitely like to experiment with again in the future. 

My photoshop skills have developed again - I had never used photoshop for animating before so learning about creating frames, repeating the sequence, etc, was all new to me. It took quite a bit of getting used to because the use of layers is quite confusing but I realised I needed to put as many components on separate layers as possible because although this looks more complex on screen, it makes life a lot easier later on. 

One thing that I think I could have improved on was my photography of the pepper. The photos are not great quality which isn't too much of an issue due to the compressed size of the gif file. However, it was the colouring of the photos which I think could be better; I didn't consider lighting very well because I took these photos during the evening using a lamp for my main source of lighting when I probably should have waited until the daytime to photograph it in natural light. Another alteration I would make to my final gifs is the movement of the mouth in the bad hair day gif. I have no issues with the animation of the mouth but I think I could have studied facial expressions in more depth and found a more relevant mouth movement to fit the emotions of the character.