Past Project Evaluation - LoopdeLoop Hallucination Animation

With this project being my first project on this course and also my first attempt at 2D Animation, I think it is a good idea to look back upon my past work quite critically so that my progress in artwork and project management is more noticeable to myself and to my peers.

To begin with, I created a mindmap with the word "Hallucination" in the centre and worked from that point onwards to help generate my initial concepts.

From this point, I made very rough storyboard sketches and typed out my initial thoughts on the brief and concepts in a Word document as quoted

Initial Thoughts and Ideas

Initially when I think of a looped animation, I think of a walk cycle however, this does not really incorporate a narrative structure and I feel I should take advantage of the brief mentioning that it could be “As creative as you like”.  Taking into consideration the task at hand however, overcomplicating a loop increases the margin for error and makes the work significantly more difficult without necessarily improving the end product.

Ideas

Squid Idea

The animation opens with a close up shot of an eye. The pupil of the eye dilates and the camera zooms in on the black, filling the screen. As the shot fades from black, the view changes to what the eye is seeing, in this instance a city scene but appearing underwater. After a few fish swim past, a giant squid floats into shot, gets scared and shoots across the screen leaving behind ink. The ink squirt grows and makes the screen black, the shot then zooms back out and the black was the pupil making the animation come full circle.

School Idea

The animation shows a boy at school falling asleep in a boring lesson on his desk. The animation then cuts to the boy’s nightmare of him falling down a large well with sharks at the bottom. As the boy hits the water, the shot changes to the boy’s face screaming and a few shots of him pushing himself away from the desk in fright. The animation then returns to the original start frame and the boy starts falling asleep again.

Waving Idea

In the centre of the animation there is a man at a music festival swaying with his arms in the air from side to side. The swaying gets progressively more intense until the man is flopping from side to side unnaturally with his feet still firmly planted. After the animation has reached its peak of intensity the man slows down until he has reached the original state of movement.

Shadow Idea

The animation shows a man standing in front of a dirty brick wall with a long shadow projected behind him to one side. The light source moves past making the shadow switch sides and as the shadow on the wall nears the man, it transforms into a sinister figure reaching towards to man. The light source then switches back to the original side and as the shadow figure returns, it reaches towards the man again. This returns the animation to its original place.

Sky Idea

This animation consists of a man on a hill staring up at the sky and wherever he turns his head, a hexagonal mesh appears. As his head turns, the mesh fades and highlights where he is looking. Behind the mesh the stars twinkle consistently adding a layer of depth to the animation.

Television Idea

This animation idea is from a first person perspective of sitting and watching a television flicking through the channels. After a certain number of channel changes, a channel with the person on the chair appears as though they are being watched through the television or like they are the channel. After briefly watching themselves, the person on the screen and the person sitting in the chair skip past the channel returning to the start of the animation.

Sneezing Idea

This is a very basic idea of a man sneezing and as he sneezes he becomes more pixelated. When he inhales after the sneeze, he then becomes less pixelated and returns to the beginning of the animation.

Waving arms Idea

This idea consists of having a delayed blur behind the movement of an object in shot, for instance an arm swaying but having several arms following it in varying opacity. This will hopefully give the illusion that time is slowing down.


Following peer reviews and further research, I decided that I would follow the "Squid Idea" as it became apparent that this was the idea which I had the most vivid ideas for and this would help with the production process.

At this point I was new to the course and as I had previously used Adobe Photoshop I thought it best to produce my animation inside this program. I feel this was a wise decision as the burden of starting a new course and learning a new software could have been overwhelming and affected the quality of work.

The screenshots below give an indication of how the final animation looked, However the coloured guides were used to help me get a better idea of what will be visible in the render and did not appear in the final product.

If I was to Redo this project I would research into a 2D style more giving my animation more of a stylised look as when I created this animation I was still unsure about how it would look. Ideally I would create a blockier artistic appearance and remove all the linework as I feel that this makes the animation appear messy and rushed (which to some extent it was, due to my late joining on the course).

Despite the appearance of the end product, I think that my storyboarding and conceptual stages were approached with care and I the majority of the ideas I came up with could still be used in future projects.