Although there has been more than it's fair share of panic attacks, worries and issues with this project, it really has been a surprisingly successful one. It's seen me take existing skills to whole new levels, it's seen me learn entirely new ones, and it's given me confidence in my ability to animate. Even if at the low points of this module it seemed like an impossible task, and that all my plans to do animation as a hobby that I've developed and held onto for many years now were going down the toilet, in the end it showed that, while there's always improvements to be made, it is possible to make good-looking animation with the skills and technology I have. A limited type of animation, sure, but animation nonetheless.
The early stages of the production seem like a very different time, mostly due to the fact that so much of the plan changed during production. The ideas I came up with for the script were sound enough, not great, but the potential was there for something good to come of it. That was the problem though, it needed development, and that would require more time than I had to work with. I'm not sure if I'll take the concept forward as is, in fact I'm probably not going to develop it any further in future, but some of the characters and concepts are interesting enough that I may call upon them in future projects, perhaps even make into a film based upon but very different to the current outline. It's a possibility, at least.
Meanwhile, looking back I'm kind of stunned how quickly I found an alternative for the production side of the module. I honestly have no recollection of the thought process behind selecting that exact dialogue exchange from that exact online video. Maybe it was the fact that it was a female character talking to various male ones, which fit the bill since I'm male and the animated character is female, I don't know. My only memory is importing the video into audio editing software to cut out the required audio directly so that I didn't have to see the relevant video footage, so that I wouldn't be influenced in any way by the original video's camera choices.
Given how I had to vastly scale down my Practices work when I found how little experience I had in designing a full character, the fact that I had a full character made and ready to go as quickly as I did still shocks me. It probably helps that the character was pre-existing in my mind to some extent, so I had building blocks and foundations to build upon, but still, getting it done as well as it is in that short amount of time remains staggering, especially since I had no idea how to design her mouth shapes and just created whatever came to me first, and that miraculously ended up working and working really damn well.
The rigging process was a long and stressful one, but it resulted in a lot of learning experience and means that I'll never have to go through it again now that I know what I'm doing, to a basic extent. In hindsight, of course, it's easy to think that the process is simple and relatively self explanatory, the bones being parented to the bone that is currently selected when you create the new bone sounds like an obvious choice, and it is obvious when you fully grasp how to create bones, but it is one of many little things about boning (*immature snigger*) that wouldn't occur to newcomers, or at least didn't occur to me at the time. Now that I know how it is done, I can create a simple character ready for animation, but more complex characters is something I plan to develop going forward.
The actual animation process was simple enough for even a beginner to grasp. The timing aspect was aided at first by the dope sheets, but once I got the hang of it (the Animator's Survival Guide had already gotten me thinking more about the technicalities of timing than I had, say, when making that test animation way back at the start of the module, which had already won more than half the battle), I was able to produce, again, surprisingly expressive, believable and well-timed animation considering I'm a complete beginner.
Speaking of which, being a complete beginner to masking in After Effects seems like a step down from that, considering its comparable simplicity to making animation, but it's still another skill in the toolbox I can now call upon when needed.
The actual editing process was pretty simple, I had the timings for the shots down pat with the animatic, so mostly it was just a process of matching the completed footage to it, taking out animatic footage bit by bit and replacing each clip with the finished video. The only major concern was over the video sync vs audio sync issue, which threatened to cause a level of stress unseen since the rigging stage, but thankfully after export tests showed that matching the audio produced a better result I went with that option. It is still a concern, though. This was a relatively simple project, and going forward to develop more ambitious animations will mean that I'll have to keep a wary eye on how taking the audio through the cut-down version I use to import into Anime Studio Pro (so that I'm just working with the audio for each shot rather than the audio for the entire scene and having 75% or so just be blank image or static character), exporting from ASP, through After Effects, and finally back to Premiere again affects audio sync.
Looking at the finished product, I know I sound like a stuck record on this point, but it really does surprise me how well I rose to the challenge of this module. Although I've explored it to a limited extent both in other modules and outside of college, this is a far greater level of completion than I've ever worked to before, and the fact that, when it comes to this sort of finished product, I can come into it with as little experience as I did and come out with something this good-looking is very heartening. It is still a baby step on a long road, it's a pretty low-key animation with the character sitting still the whole time and having to cheat around not having the character move her head at all, but it is a steady, solid step nonetheless. In Practices, I explored the concept of creating a believable space with my minimalist Illustrator-based art style, and that's just static backgrounds, a moving, living character is another prospect entirely. Now, in Consolidation, I finally carry through with that idea to produce something of a level of believability I'd never have thought I'd be able to produce just a few months ago.
But perhaps the single moment that sums up this whole module was when, after countless hours tearing my hair out trying to rig the character right, and a few more hours refining the bone movement and switch layer keyframes, I played the first shot through, and saw not a collection of shapes being moved around by bones, but a robot girl exasperatedly sighing and asking an offscreen colleague to continue. Words cannot describe the elation and vindication I felt at that moment.
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