#LOWERING THE SKILL FLOOR TO MAKE AESTHETICALLY PLEASING ART IS A *GOOD* THING FOR ACCESSIBILITY

[tangibletechnomancy]

The more I experiment with this project and its philosophy, the more aggressively anticapitalist I get, and that is saying a lot considering where I started from

[liamblogc-blog]

Evaluation

Animation Review

My target audience was originally 13+ and I feel like my final product half suits it and half doesn’t. I didn’t have time to make my fight scenes so in that sense I feel like the target audience could have been lower. On the other hand If I had finished my product then I still would have used social media to build an audience. This means that the target audience would need to remain 13+ as anyone younger than that shouldn’t be accessing social media. In terms of existing products that my target audience would be consuming I would be thinking about an animated series. An example of this could be The Simpsons or Family Guy. These are two series that I feel like 13 year old’s are very interested in. Both of these shows have a crude humour element to them which I would not be able to match with in my own animation. I didn’t have any talking in my animation so it would be hard to get a sense of humour. In terms of style I think those shows are more attractive to my target audience as they present a more 3D element. My animation is a 2D stick animation which I think is definitely suitable to my target audience, but I don’t think that I could compete with the interest of larger shows. I think if someone from my target audience were to watch my animation then they would not think that it is suitable. This is because someone of that age would see that there is no violence or humour and would lose interest. My animation definitely could be improved and could be more suited to my target audience with more time in development. I asked Tom, Jordan, Ryan and Oscar to review my animation. There was mixed feedback. I first asked if it suits my target audience. Ryan and Jordan said that it does suit the audience because the art style of the backgrounds is appropriate. Oscar and Tom said that it does not suit the audience because there is nothing that makes it more mature. I asked if a fight scene would make it suit the target audience and they both said yes. I only had the opportunity to do a focus group at the end of my production time so I didn’t have the opportunity to make changes and present the audience with a different product. This could have been key to the progress of my game because I could use the feedback that I received to improve on target areas.

Original Ideas Review

I had originally planned to create a 2D side-scrolling stick animation. This would include fight scenes and lots of action. Because of time constraints I could not complete my project to the standard that I would have liked to. I was unable to create the fight scenes and there was no action. Despite this, I am still pleased with what I made. The art style was perfect and exactly what I had initially planned for. The backgrounds were based off of copyright-free images that I then traced in Flash and filled with colour. I find that creating concept art and backgrounds like this is much easier for me to do because I don’t have the creativity to make up an image in my head and transfer that to paper or into Flash. I also managed to make the character exactly how I had imagined it. I created the character using the line tool and then filled the shapes with the gradient tool. I had to use the gradient adjust tool to change the strength, position and rotation of the gradient. I kept the gradient at the same rotation the whole way through, which makes it slightly unrealistic but it keeps it simple so that I don't have to change orientation every frame. I was not able to add any audio to my animation which is a shame because it definitely would have upped the quality of it. Ability had nothing to do with this, I just left in until too late and then didn't have time to incorporate it. I decided against putting any interactivity in the animation. At first I thought that each project had to have a level of interactivity to it, which is why I planned to add the video player aspect. I recently discovered that this wasn't necessary so I decided to cut the idea to save time.

Technical and Aesthetic, Style and Content

Although some negative changes had to be made to my original ideas, I also did a few things that added to what I had originally planned for. I added a sense of depth to the animation using a simple floor bock for the character to walk on. In the early stages of the animation this has little effect because the floor is just black. In the cave it makes a big difference. I decided to go for a background which included a floor to it so it makes it look more 3 dimensional. I think that the biggest change to my animation is the title scene. I hadn't planned to do a title scene because I didn't think about the effect that it would have. Now that I have done one, I am very happy that I decided for it. It makes a big difference because it means that the animation doesn't just randomly start. It has an introduction that ends with a glare of light which leads into the first scene. I am happy with this. I had originally wanted to use multiple tools which would make animating an easier process. Some of these tools and mechanics ended up confusing me and making it harder. I experimented with using the bone tool to draw my character out, but because of the odd rotation around each axis I decided to just use the line tool. Another thing I decided against was using movie clips to repeat the walk cycle rather than individual key-framing tweens. The problem with this was that the movie clip would repeat more detailed than the key frame tweens. Although this sounds like a good thing, it wasn't. The low frame rate that I was using meant that the movie clip looked really out of place. I was also unable to control the repeat rate of the clips, so I would have had to alter each clip anyway. For this reason I decided to just copy and paste key-frames instead.

Strengths and Weaknesses

I feel confident in my skill progression throughout this project. Although I was unable to complete my project, I got a lot of practice doing things that I wasn't too good at before. My skills in Adobe Flash have developed well. I can now use key binds to change to all of the basic tools which makes my animating much more efficient. These skills might be useful in the second year. The biggest problem that I faced came when I was animating the walk cycle. I had planned to use repeated movie clips. As previously stated I ran into complications with this so I overcame the issue by simply using single frame animation. Obviously another problem that I ran into is the fact that I couldn't finish the animation. I don't think there's anything more that I could have done about this. I spent a long time on pre-production and research and I wanted the written work to be as good as possible. If I would have given myself more time then I would have been able to do more, but I would rather my written work be a high quality and the animation not be finished. Thanks to my knowledge of Adobe Flash, I was able to solve some of these problems. Some of my weaknesses showed through at certain points during the project. My time management was definitely off, with not giving myself enough time to complete the project, possibly spending time doing things that didn’t need to be done etc.