Evaluation ~ Vince

I think the planning and research for our animation were the most successful factors we achieved in our project. We had perfected and delivered a reasonable amount of content for our Auteur director study so we knew exactly what materials were relevant for our pitch. The focus was to try and have literal narrative where the mise-en-scene would display objects relating to the songs lyrics, an explicit example would be the tangerine man. We made sure that we found some clear past footage of influences that would aid in constructing our props and decor together. On top of that, one of main priorities was to keep our blog up to date which I believe helped us reflect on any uncertain steps we may have neglected. Some of these included our shot list and timeline where we had a tough time trying to film each scene and make up for any gaps within our track. One of the major improvements we should have done was to annotate our storyboard more accurately so we could easily follow the next scenes to animate without hesitation.

Other downsides to our project were the time consuming measures. Even though we had prepared enough props to animate. We were unaware of the tedious length it would take to film each shot as well setting up the equipment before filming takes place. To counter this we thought we'd try tell our teacher in advance to get all the equipment sorted so we could start filming straight away. Despite the delays being dealt with. We encountered some troubles with lighting and the automatic blur on the istopmotion software. These small hindrances unfortunately required us to be patient as there was another group that were also suffering the same difficulties.

The biggest challenge for us was planning how long each scene would take by judging the length of the song with our time line. Even though we had made a few annotations indicating when we would finish at a specific interval. We didn't manage follow the guide as exact to how we wanted which was mainly due to our inexperience knowledge with istopmotion. One of these facts was the fade tool "Onion Skinning" which allowed us to see further back where our previous frames images were taken. It would've been better had we knew about this function earlier so that we could easily anticipate how much time we needed to spend on each scene.

When it came down to the editing, we wasted no time re-arranging the scenes. The important aspect was to match the following sequences in conjunction with the song's lyrics. We wanted to achieve a literal link between visuals and lyrics to show that there's a narrative involved. At the moment we're left with a 20 second gap due us running out of storyboard sequences. However we also realized we filmed each scene too short in contrast to our shot list plan. Our main priority will be to film the complimentary close up shots to help improve the flow of our animation.