Responding to Peer Feedback

Thank you everyone who watched and posted feedback to my animation, in this post I will be responding to it.

Thomas Wilson

The reason I have the music as it was, is because it was intended to be a music video, for the specific song, because of this reason, I could not change the music during the fight scene, but I do agree about the explosion, I wish I had animated more of an explosion, my original intention was to have it cut off abruptly, but it didn’t work very well as it was not the end of the song, but part way through so it doesn’t feel right when it ends, though you were never meant to see after the explosion, my plan was always for it to end abruptly. Thank you for your feedback.

Matty Oxley

Thank you, as you can see when you look closely, I also had a bit of issue keeping the paper in line, it just likes to go all over the place as you film, as for the “FIGHT” scene where the text comes up, I felt it delayed a little for a second, so I wish I made it cut off a little sooner, so my timing was a little off.

James Smerdon

Thank you James, and I agree, the lighting was terrible, next time I will bug Kevin for a better environment to animate in, so that it is more consistent, maybe a studio with a light would be good, although I’m not sure that would be possible in the college, and I will take note on the gun, though with the words fight only being shouted for a second, I had a time constraint to keep within.

 Above is an example of some of the choppy lighting, it goes from very dark to to much brightness very quickly.

Andrew Culley

Thank you very much, I used thicker card like paper rather than just paper, this gave a little weight to the paper, making it stay still a little better than normal paper, it also created a nice dense colour. Thank you though I personally feel the timing could have been better, just cut-off a little sooner for the “FIGHT” part and some other things I felt were off.

Soph MBoro

Thank you Sophie, I’m glad you liked the sound and I agree again, the explosion could have went on a little longer, but my original plan was to have it cut off abruptly, as the song ends abruptly, but I had ended up not using the whole song, as I did not have time to animate for the whole song sadly.

Charlie Breed

Thanks Charlie, it's really encouraging to see this kind of feedback, if you like the song it's made by Starship Amazing, and it's called "FIGHT"

Michael Lane

Hey Mike, thanks for the feedback, I agree with the lighting, it was terrible, but there wasn't a lot I could do as I was animating in a classroom full of people doing things, I'm not sure how the lighting was that bad though, it changes a lot and I could not work out why, it's not like the other students were flicking the light on and off, also the video becomes very blurred at one point, I think I may have messup with the camera focus at one point here is an example below.

Finished Animation

Here is my finished animation, it took about 3 weeks to make as I could only animate during the appropriate lesson, I am okay with the outcome but it wasn't as well made as I'd liked, with the lighting being really off, followed by the abrupt finish.

Hope that you like it, as I really enjoyed making it.

Cutout animation works by creating characters and sets using bits of paper cut into shapes, and moving them a little at a time before taking a photo, it's a similar process to frame by frame drawn animation, but instead of drawing it, you have the bits already cut out, and move them yourself, so it can be a little more complicated, you play back the individual frames at a fast speed so that it creates the illusion of movement.


Creating the animation
I started out by coming up with idea for an animation, after a while of thinking, I had decided to do an animation I had came up with quite a while ago, but instead to do it as a cutout animation, I did this because cutout was the best way to make this kind of animation I felt, stop motion with clay though doable would not have been as practical, though it would have been cool to try I decided to go with the more practical option, and I was not allowed to animate on the computer, so cutout was the best choice, I often come up with videos to go with the music I listen to, it often just happens as I blank out and start to day dream while listening to music, so in a way I already had the idea before we even started.

After this I created a story board, I had tried to mark at the top of the slides the timing I would need to properly animate the video, setting the start and stop times of each slide, sadly this did not work out as I needed to cut my animation down to 30 seconds, rather than the full minute due to constraints, after this I went to a craft shop and purchased some quality paper, thicker than usual paper so it would not be as likely to crease and fall apart in my hands as I am somewhat heavy handed, before creating them though I came up with a few ideas for different space ships and monsters, in the end I went with the more basic but visually pleasing space ship, I felt it worked well as it was easy to move around, and was a practical shape.

For the monster I got a bit more ambitious, I took inspiration from the Futurama monster from the episode "The beast will a billion backs" as it is a planet sized cloud monter with huge pink coloured tentacles, when creating the monster however, I found I did not get enough paper, so I had to down size my monster, originally I had planned for the monster to be far to big to fit onto the screen, and even serve as the background at one point as evident in my story board, but instead I down sized it and made it just a little smaller than the screen, though it never fully comes into view.

While animating I had to tape a camera to the top of the mac screen to get enough hight from the table, I used iStopMotion 3 to create the animation, it took about 3 lessons to fully animate my video, as well as editing in the lazer shots from the spaceship using Adobe After Effects, to put in the music soundtrack I used garageband and to put in the titles and credits I used iMovie, then exporting it into an MP4 file format.