Making of the Animation - FLASH

Author's own

Above are two GIFS for two separate times during the making of the scene above. In this scene my character has destroyed one of the round objects of anxiety, but when she looks up, all the hidden balls around the room suddenly start to open up before her. I began this process of making by first looking at my storyboard and animatic. I then had an idea of the length of time I had to show this expression. I made a really rough animation which would serve as a guide. This helped me because it let me put the idea onto the screen to see what expressions worked and what didn't. What I liked about this particular clip is the change from a happy character (the first time you see this) to a very frightened and surprised one. Referring back to my character designs and expression sheets I noted I wanted the eyes to express a lot of the emotion as there is no dialogue. I feel I have achieved this and created a character with a lot of movement and translation. The bottom one shows my finished clip. You can see my use of colour that I have explored previously,the browns work really well in displaying the security and passiveness of my character.

Author's own

Author's own

Above, you can see my evidence of using Adobe Flash to create my animation. My first problem that I faced when using this program was setting up the right document size, I accidentally selected a default size that was way too small. Thankfully I realized this, before I had committed to a finished outline and it was only a rough guide I tested. To overcome this I created a new document and converted the animation I had done before into a symbol which I could easily enlarge and draw over. Below is another set of images this time displaying the process of how I created each scene. I began by outlined a rough animation (which you cannot see) the guide was used to make sure that everything looked ok without spending to much time on it. I then applied a final outline(with another layer) so I could keep referring back and forth to the previous drawings. This is the longest process as I had to keep tailoring to ensure it looked fluent and realistic. If I got this stage wrong it could easily ruin the look of the animation. Furthermore full bodies are most difficult however when I carried out life drawing I was able to study movement easier. The next stage was to create the hair, I wanted specifically to add a lot of movement to the hair so I created it on another layer to spend a lot of time on it. I did this so that the movement of the character could be captured even when the frame was zoomed into the face only. After this I applied the colours from my development stage. After that, I put in the background, produced from my development stage. This was simple but it added a lot of effect which fueled the world of my animation. Lastly I animated the tentacles- This took longer than I thought because I had to create something that was constantly moving and attacking her. I decided at this stage how the tentacles moved because when planning I couldn't see what the tentacles would act as living things. It was only when I animated that I could see what looked good.

Problems that arose

1. Time management
The first problem that I faced was time management. I had not planned for the creative making week and therefore I had t cut down my development weeks to two weeks. Which meant I had less time to come up with a story etc. So when it came to making I lost time finalizing specific areas that were important for making. I overcame this by cutting off some of my animation (see below).

2. Changing the idea
The next problem was influenced by the time management (issue above) and also because I did not realise how consuming some of the aspects of my animation would be. Therefore I had to make the desicion of editing the start and the ending( cutting down scenes). What I changed was: I no longer had the interaction between the friend and her, or her running home. I decided to have the animation exclusively within the bedroom. This I had originally thought about because I wanted to see the character within her comfort zone (her home). I actually preferred this becuase it cut straight into the action and worked better within the time frame. I had to unfortunately get rid of the ending and leave it as a cliff hanger; at the time I wasn't sure about about this, however when I came up with the story I had trouble with making a powerful ending. I like leaving the ending to the imagination of the audience.

3. Can't draw
Finally I struggled when drawing the animation at points as some of the action movements were difficult to visualize. To overcome this I used myself or a model to recreate the actions. So I could rethink how to present them in my animation.

What was successful

1. Colour 
Colour. Colour is important! Infact in my eyes it brings the animation together and emphasises the symbolism of Anxiety on the subconscious mind. I spent a lot of time choosing appropriate colours that work the best. Not only displaying the symbolic meanings (Browns=Comfort/security/strength) but also what would look good within the Flash medium because flash does not look that appealing to the eyes. I decided on using brown outline instead of black as it is softer. One of my influences of colour palette was the Egyptian tablets I saw at the British Museum, I really loved the tones together. The second influence was looking at "Petit Trois Points" a French animation that looks at post traumatic disorder that looks a lot at dark vs light tones to express the anxiety vs healing.

2. Expressions 
As previously stated the next successful thing in my animation is the expression of the character. It was vital that the expression conveyed the emotion to allow audiences to clearly identify the story.

3. Different angles
Different angles is another really important aspect in creating interesting story. From my research stage I watched lots of different films that tackled the issue of Anxiety and the subconscious. These films helped me to explore different angles to show action. Firstly "Hitchcock" because of his inventive use of angles and portraying serious plots(thriller). Secondly Vanilla Sky uses quick montages to express the confusion which people do not usually understand with the subconscious. Lastly The Fantastic Fear of Everything which uses the angles and slow motion to convey a comic genre that also scares the audience to believe the irrational fears.