Cutout animation evaluation

Cutout animation attempt evaluation

Having now completed the animation there are a lot of things which I would change due to poor organizational skills and conflicting work. Primarily, the main thing I would change about the finished product is the addition of sound. Due to many of the scenes in my animation being changed and condensed based around the potential use of sound, the lack of it creates a strange experience where the story is not obvious and animations do not work as well in silence.

If I was to redo this animation I would make sure that the process of building scenes had more structure so that the set has more consistency to the floor plans created in Adobe Illustrator. The creation of scenes although editable could be better as I had envisioned the animation moving along with music but I did not know how to time movements properly and could not locate music which would be fitting to the scene.

The final change I would make would be to add a lot more detail to the scenes such as additional characters which could help enhance the scene or keep the animation consistent with the script. Overall however I am happy with the process taken to create the assets for moving characters by segmenting them. Despite taking a lot of the time allocated, the segmented characters proved to be versatile and reusable as well as staying true to the cut out style’s I was emulating. One thing which I would add to the assets would be a large oversized head consisting of faces showing different expressions. This is shown to some extent in scene 3 with the Angela Merkel character changing expression as she snorts the note up her nose. A criticism of this scene is that despite using display tags to control the visibility, the changes between the first expression and the second expression still the show semitransparent transitioning frames. If I was to redo this scene, I would research a better method for making objects appear and disappear.

Overall I feel that the animation could have been a lot better than it was and I put this down to having poor organizational skills and not sticking to the guides I created. I also feel that the guides would have been better if I had revised the technique I was planning on using in Cinema 4D before writing them.

Apart from this the main thing which prevented workflow was the strange problem my animations had with ray depth in the render setting which took a significant amount of time to diagnose and fix the problem however now this will not hinder future animations.

On top of learning how to fix the ray depth problem, I also learnt various effective methods of creating alpha channels and textures which I am sure will help me with my digital work in the future. By using the photomontage technique that I did to create the assets, I have learn the benefits of tools such as the Fill>Content Aware tool which is incredibly versatile in regards to manipulating photos and generating new content.