Final Animation: Part 3 & Evaluation

A screen shot of a scene in my animation.


This is a quick render of my final rotoscope animation.


This is a screen shot of one the scenes in my animation.



Another quick render of my final rotoscope animation, showing the progress as I'm going along.





This is my final render of my rotoscope video created in Toon Boom, I think it's turned out quite well and I was really looking forward to creating this. It turned out much easier and better than my other 2 ideas since I managed to get a high quality video to rotoscope and it was something in which I wanted to do as well.
As well as enjoying creating my animation sequence in Toon Boom I also found problems with using Toon Boom, it wasn't very user friendly in some areas and it was very time consuming to animate 20secs in Toon Boom depending on the frame rate.
If I was to re-do this animation again, I'd look deeper into Toon Boom to see what features it has and in what ways I can use it to improve my animation, not only that but I would also research further into the other animation softwares to see whether I can use multiple animation softwares to create an animation instead of just using one.Given more time to re-do this animation I would add colour into it as it's quite bland at the moment, not only that but I'd also research into how to add special effects into it.
Overall, this animation turned out to be a success and I'm really proud of the outcome after all the time and effort I have put into it. I'm happy with the way it turned out as my initial idea was to do a fighting scene knowing it wasn't going to be easy to do and in the end I have something to show for my hard work.

Final Animation: Part 2

This was my 2nd idea, I decided to rotoscope a video which I liked of Cabal, but after getting into it I didn't like the way it was turning out and found it rather hard to rotoscope since the image quality of it was quite poor. Not only that but I found as I was rotoscoping the images and colour of the shoe constantly kept changing and it didn't seem to fit in with the previous/next frames.

If the video was in high quality and at least the size of 720 x 576 I would highly consider picking up this idea and rotoscoping it once again but because I had so much difficulty in finding the video in a better quality than what I'd seen in YouTube I didn't want to waste so much time browsing around on the internet for this video in high quality.

Storyboard for Final Animation

This is the storyboard for my final animation that I decided to do, of course after changing my idea several times I only ever managed to create a storyboard for one of the ideas, as all the other ideas I just gathered in my head and didn't really have the time to draw them down.

Overall, although the storyboard only has 8 drawn boxes to show my whole 20sec animation but I generally have an idea in my head as to what I want to do and how I'm going to do it.

Final Animation: Part 1

This was my initial idea of creating these 2 characters and making a fight scene, but after working into it I found it difficult where to position the arms and legs therefore I decided to stop and change my idea to something more simplier, and since I didn't know how to set pins onto the character I didn't want to waste too much time researching.

Given more time I probably would have liked to continue on with this idea, making the animation up as I go along but since I didn't have much time to do so I ended up having to change the idea to something else.

Rotoscope Research

Since I decided to rotoscope my 20sec animation in Toon Boom, I thought it'd be best if I did a small amount of research into rotoscope as many of my friends have asked me before what rotoscoping is.

So, rotoscoping is basically what animators call when they trace live-action footage frame-by-frame, so that they can use it in animated films.

A good example of a rotoscoped film would be, Scanner Darkly, starring Keanu Reeves. The reason why the creators decided to rotoscope the film was because they wanted to give the film a distinctive look.

I have already covered rotoscope in a previous tutorial session and really enjoyed it therefore I decided to create my 20sec animation using rotoscope in Toon Boom, since its a new piece of software to me I decided against using Flash to make an animation since I've used it previously and I know the software quite a bit.

Rotoscoping

These are the initial drawings I did in Toon Boom of rotoscoping, it wasn't easy to draw over the image with a mouse. I think it'd be better and easier to do with a graphics tablet.



After looking at my initial drawings I didn't like the outcome therefore I restarted the whole process again. Again using the mouse to draw over the image, but this time making it look more like its a sketch drawing rather than just drawing over it with a single line.

Overall, I quite liked the idea of rotoscoping and again I might consider using it for my final 20sec animation. Although I have ideas for my 20sec animation I am currently thinking which animation software would be the best to use to bring out my animation the way I want it to be.
The disadvantage of rotoscoping is that it can be time consuming if there are a lot of images which needs to be traced over. Not only that but drawing/tracing with the mouse isn't that easy and doesn't give as good effect as using a graphics tablet.
An advantage could be that if you're not very good at drawing it's not really that difficult to trace over an image.

Animation: Why Is It Relevant To Multimedia Technology?

Animation is relevant to my course, Multimedia Technology, because it is one of the areas in which Multimedia covers, not only that but also due to the fact that it'd be relevant and helpful in the near future when we're applying applying for Multimedia jobs.

Animation is one of the subject area's which plays a vital part in Multimedia Technology, its just like the other subject area's such as Video, Graphics Design, etc.

As shown in the previous blog posts of the tutorials which were taught, it shows a range of different types of animation softwares, by teaching us these softwares and going through tutorials with us it gives us an insight to those softwares. This helps us if in the near future we get a job in the media area and we have some sort of knowledge of the software required, even if they do provide training, it'd look better for us in the future if we mentioned that we already have an insight in the programme itself.

I chose Animation Applications as 1 of my final year electives as I plan on going into this area once I graduate, not only that but its relevant towards my final group project which is going to be heavily used, therefore by taking this module I have learnt quite a few new softwares that could be discussed upon with my group as to which animation software would be the best one to use for animating our idea.