Year Evaluation

Having completed my first year at Newcastle College doing an FdA in Animation and Illustration I have done several modules to help further my development in many forms of media.

Joining the course a few weeks into the first module, I learnt the 12 basic principles of animation introduced through Disney’s book the illusion of life. I had previously come across these techniques while researching animation techniques myself, although I think actually having the time to practice these techniques, even briefly, helped me understand the way 2D animation works.

Shortly after this project, I was set a task to produce a loop for the LoopdeLoop website’s brief of Hallucination. Feeling behind on work and missing information from the first few weeks, I asked other class members for help learning about things such as walk cycles and the hallucination project which helped significantly with my design process. To begin with I spent a lot of time storyboarding ideas on one piece of paper as this method of planning helped me visualise how the animation would move without having to commit to other methods which I did not yet know. Despite the overall speed of this method, many of my ideas contained excessive frames for little movement and demanded more detail although most designs were not aesthetically pleasing and would not make sense on their own visually and required annotation.

While I was creating the animation I felt pressed for time and the actual style and feel of the animation is significantly lacking as I didn’t do any research into particular animation styles or artists. By not researching artists or the techniques previously, the animation is quite sketchy and in the time available I could have created something significantly more stylised.

The next module was how to approach the sequential imaging side of animation and helped me to understand a lot about how the original idea will be changed significantly in these stages. The idea I originally wanted to pursue ended up being rejected in favour of another idea after I created rough storyboards, helping me to realise all the flaws in my concept. During this phase I also learnt how to use Adobe Illustrator to a greater advantage compared to previous experiences. During my free time I also experimented with Illustrator more and it has since become one of my favoured creative tools.

This module I felt went well and I was happy with the assets I produced for the storyboards and the process itself moving from concept to script, through a character design stage and then creating the storyboards. If I was doing this project again for a company, I would produce a few variations of scenes in the storyboard so that peer review can decide which scenes best help represent the idea to help create the most concrete representation of my idea.

The next project I participated in was the production of a short animation displaying my attempts at pseudo 3D animation (a technique replicating traditional cut-out animation in a 3D software) in Maxon Cinema 4D. While I enjoyed the conceptual stages and the experience of using new software, the style of animation did not particularly interest me and I feel that my ideas were overly ambitious to try and improve my enjoyment of the module.

Whilst creating the animation, I encountered numerous problems not only with the software at home but also at college effectively crippling my workflow and halting all of my progress. Initially I tried to work around the problem but the progress that was made was of poor quality and deterred me from the work significantly. Eventually I managed to locate a solution to the problem but this a day or two before the deadline and I effectively failed at this project.

From this experience I learnt that I should research in advance the software and trial it myself so that any of these issue could be resolved in a less important time. On the positive side I learnt about many useful tools and settings such as cartoon shaders in Cinema 4D that will help shape several future ideas and the excessive repetition has made me familiar with the software and how I like to work in it.

Throughout the course, I believe that this stage was the hardest but has helped me consider my workflow in a more critical light forcing me to become more organised in regards to work layout in software, folder management and time management. Despite this improvement, in my free time I hope to create a more rigid work pattern, maybe creating a premade template for my research and development work or set stages on how I will approach the production in the future.

Following this project, I started work on modelling and rigging a character in Cinema 4D. Following my newfound organisational methods for this software, I found the production and basic rigging of the character surprisingly simple only struggling with complex sections such as the foot roll sliders which were produced using the Xpresso Tag which I had researched before I had started 3D modelling.



Overall, I have found the year highly education and enjoyable helping me consider my future a lot more. Next year I intend on working heavily with 3D software as the versatility of the medium and its frequent occurrence in the art world makes me sure that it will still be used and evolve through the years I will hopefully be functioning in the industry. One of the things I have enjoyed the most about the course was the way I was taken out of my comfort zone and learnt to experience software at my own pace depending on what I was interested in and what was I wanted to make relevant to my project. As I progressed through the year I made huge changes to the way that I approach organisation and eventually I hope to be able to balance work projects with recreational projects and free time.