Evaluation

Molly - 

Overall, I believe the production of our animation was relatively successful. It met our original requirements and planning, and the story didn’t change during the production of it. Certain aspects needed to be changed during the production, for instance the ending – when the chick is meant to be hit on the head, and have the dizzy stars around him, but instead we changed it so that he runs away from the rock coming towards him. The main obstacle that we overcame was the actual program that we used to create it. Adobe flash player was extremely confusing, however after watching this tutorial on it – it began making much more sense, and we could continue with the production confidently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNzjC_6qk-8

I contributed to the production just as equally as the fellow classmate I was working with. I contributed during the learning of how to use flash player, and it was my turn first to create the beginning part of the animation. I then got to transfer my experience on skills during the next lesson to my partner, as it was then her first time of using flash. From then on we took it in turns to continue creating the animation. I am also very pleased with my contribution of the last scene where the older chick throws the rock and the other chick runs away.

I think the technical and aesthetic qualities of our production were extremely artistic and successful. We created the background from scratch, and added in the fence and sign from Google images. We also got the chick online, and we were very successful in making this chick seem our own, by changing certain positions in adobe Photoshop, and my skill set. 

Our original research requirements and target audience, in my opinion were met. Our research requirements were that we made it humorous, and animated. The only thing requirement that we didn’t contain was that the audience thought speaking was a good idea to include in the animation, as they said it was the only thing they would change from our focus group video – The Cat Came Back. However we feel this was over-doing the animation, and giving ourselves too much work. Our target audience was around 8-14, and I feel that we successfully included the correct contents in order to entertain (purpose) our audience. It is entertaining as it is humorous and exciting.

We didn’t really need to make any modifications after completion, because we made sure that during the process we included everything. The only modification we made was editing the music. We are still using the same background music, but we added in some sound effects such as ‘Dun Dun Dunn’, which made it slightly more interesting, as it was quite repetitive.

I feel that maybe yes, if more time and resources were included, the animation may have been more professional looking. It could have been more advanced, with a bit more extra time on learning how to use flash, we may have been able to show off some extra skills. Other than this, because it was made from scratch, with no experience – it was very successful.  

Katie -

Does your animated short film meet the original requirements of your groups pitch and planning? How did you overcome obstacles?

I believe that our final animation met the original requirements of our group pitch and planning, and there were no big changes when making the animation. The focus, target group, storyline and music all turned out how we planned. However, we did not fully stick to the storyboard and the timings of our original plans. For example, the fourth shot was planned originally to be a close up zoom in shot of the grass with the chick food on the grass. However, this was not possible as we had to lock the background previously so nothing in the background would change, so this also meant that we could not change the background to a different shot, so unfortunately we had to keep the same background throughout the whole animation. This also meant that we could not do the next shot, shot 5, which was an extreme close up of the chick spotting the food after searching around the field. This was obviously annoying for Molly and I, as we wanted to stick closely to our first plans. As a result, this meant the timings were not as we planned as these shots meant our timings were not the same. Our initial idea for the software we were going to use was Adobe Flash Player, and we stuck to this idea. We thought that this programme would be easy and simple to use, however if we were to do it again, we would use a different programme that we know better. We watched tutorials on YouTube such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVzCPVt3Txs called ‘How to use Adobe’ and tutorials online such as http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/learning_guide/animation/part03.html which helped us overcome many obstacles and gave us an idea of how to use key frames and animate the chicks. Although helpful, Adobe was quite difficult to use because we had no previous experience on the software.

How did your role contribute to any possible successes?

Throughout the task, Molly and I worked a lot on the animation together because we had similar ideas and we found working as a team easier than working individually and putting our work together. In addition, on Adobe it was not possible to put two creations together so we had to always work on one computer at a time while creating our animation. We used Photoshop a lot for our piece because we had to change the movement of the chick various times so we could put different positions in the key frames. Molly did the work on Photoshop because she knew a lot about Photoshop and used it in her photography lessons. My role in the animation was adding key frames into Adobe which meant the chick was being animated and doing a lot of the creative side of the project, such as picking characters and designing the background for the animation.

Does it meet your research requirements and target audience? Is it fit for purpose?

Our animation meets the requirements and target audience we had originally thought of which was 8-14. We wanted our animation to be comical and entertaining to a young audience, and in my opinion I think we achieved that goal. Our animation is funny and simple, just like we wanted it to be, so we know that for this age it is fit for purpose. We also made sure that our animation met our research requirements and we always had in mind our feedback from the research we did, such as the focus group and questionnaire. One requirement that we didn’t use from our feedback from the focus group was that we didn’t include speaking in our animation. If we had more time, this could have been possible however we were pushed for time and didn’t want to over complicate the animation.

Were there any modifications after completion?

During the process of making our animation, we stuck to our initial ideas quite closely. This meant that we didn’t really need to make any modifications after completion because we included everything we needed to. When we exported our animation to ‘iMovie’ and this is when we made a few modifications just before completing our piece. We added in happy chirpy music from YouTube and found a ‘dun dun dun’ sound effect on YouTube as well and we inserted the sound effect when the chicks look at each other after the little chick eats the big chicks food, which made our animation more interesting when some shots were quite long.

Could the product be improved with more time and resources?

With more time and better resources, our animation could definitely be improved. There are some pauses throughout the animation where the chicks are staring for a long time, as we needed to make the animation longer. With more time we could have made both of the chicks do more and we could have made it longer and more detailed. In addition, if we had longer to do the animation we could have included speaking, just like our inspiration ‘The Cat That Came Back’. Finally, if we were able to have longer on the project, we could have had more time to get to grips more with Adobe Flash Player and we would have had the time to look at various tutorials to help us with our animation.

Throughout the process of the production, we managed to share the job roles equally, which is what we planned to do at the beginning. We made sure that we took it in turns to either be working on adobe or writing up our production schedule for what we did that lesson. It took us approximately 3 weeks, which was slightly over our original time limit, however we did exactly what we planned to do in order in this time. We agreed at the beginning that we would share every role, and we did this very well during the creation of our animation.