Reflection
This film has been a big eye opener to all the little parts that
go into making a short film. I have enjoyed making my film and I'm glad that I
made it by myself, but if I were to do it again I would get a team together and
share the work load with them. Especially for the model and set building parts
as these are not my strong points. I would however like to continue making
things towards the production, as it is a skill I would like to improve.
I think that my timing of my character movement has come out very
well and I am glad that I took the time to reanimate some of the scenes and
tested some of the harder to time scenes as I think the film looks a lot better
for it.
I was unsure how the use of 2D images and animation would look
along side the stop motion animation but I think that it compliments the
animation, and the 2D eyes give my characters more personality.
If I had more time I would work harder in the sound studio on the
narration direction. Even though the quality of the sound wasn't very well recorded
the first time, I preferred the pacing of the narration to how it sounds now. I
like how the new narration sounds, as it is very clear and sits well along the
music and the sound effects but there a few pauses that puts the pace of the
narration out and sounds quite rushed. This was because I didn't have enough
time to be able to get more takes.
I would also have liked to have used lip sync within the film,
this couldn't happen while I was filming because the replacement mouths didn't
fit my characters properly so they didn't form the shapes I needed. I wanted to
do the lip sync in post production using Toon Boom but unfortunately I ran out
of time as adding the eyes and mist effects took a lot longer than I thought
they would and the post production elements were more of a priority for the
finished film than the lip sync so I made the decision not to include any at
all.
I have enjoyed making this film because it has been like working for a client, having to be in contact with the author and the publishers to make sure they are happy and also I wanted to do the book justice, as I want to show the finished film to the author and illustrator, in the hopes that they will give me permission to enter it in competitions and show it on my website. This has given me the extra push to finish the film to a good standard.
I have liked working with the green screen, this allowed me to put the different layers of mist between the foreground, character and background. I would have liked to have used a matt painting in the background to give the scene a bit more depth, but I wasn't able to obtain one at the time.
I want to take this project back into production and spend more time perfecting the character movements some day. I would build larger sets, especially the island, dividing it up into a couple of sections to show that the character is moving around a large island. At the moment he looks like is on a very small island and isn't moving very far. I would like to use different fabric for the character's clothes because what I used was quite thin and moved too easily out of shape when I adjusted the character from pose to pose. Also recreating the replacement mouths would be a priority so that I can add in the lip sync. I would also like to complete the film to its original length of five minutes so that the whole book has been recreated.
Making this film has set me up with a wide variety of skills within a production to take forward into other projects and I now know which parts of the production I am better at and which I need to improve on. I have enjoyed animating these characters and I am looking forward to animating my next set of characters.
