Introduction

This blog post is the Post Mortem analysis for the work I have completed producing my 2D animated short for the B2 Creative Media Project brief.

What Went Well?

One thing that went well about my project is that I believe I have achieved one of the targets I set for myself earlier in the year, which was to focus on the cinematography of my animations a bit more as I am looking at going into TV and Film in my next career steps after college.

“I would like to focus more on the cinematography in my animations and
so, during my coursework, I will be focusing on the shot composition and
shot types more closely.”

That target was set in this blog post: https://media.confetti.ac.uk/alexander-xs21-yr2/2022/11/18/targets-character-qualification-and-career/

I think I have achieved this, as throughout my animation I made sure to think about the way I was drawing a scene and the structure in the composition of characters and objects. Some examples are below to show this.

In the first shot, the composition focuses on the planet featured in the animation. This motif of a circle in the center of the frame carries on throughout the animation, also being used to represent the deep hole that the character falls into. The camera in this scene moves towards the planet, and invokes imagery of looking up from the bottom of a circular hole, like one of the other shots in the animation, where the camera is looking up at the character as he peers down into the hole.

This part of the first shot where an eye closes to end the scene was added as sort of a clue that the character was being watched by an alien presence throughout his entire journey – the same alien that the hole actually turns out to be.

This composition of viewing the spaceship crash from a far away 3rd person point of view also is meant to invoke the idea that the viewer is watching this unfold through the eyes of the alien that is watching the protagonist.

These storyboards show how I planned some of these compositions.

What Could Be Improved Upon?

One thing about my project that didn’t go as planned was the fact that I wasn’t able to completely finish animating the story I had planned out in time. I think this is because of several reasons: I had chosen to work in a new software that I hadn’t animated in before (photoshop), I chose a more frame-by-frame approach to animating that took me longer to produce, I had never produced more than 10 seconds of animation before in one project and I didn’t have photoshop at home during some of the production process, meaning I was able to get less animation work done over-all. Despite this, the animation is the longest that I have made, and I experimented with different camera moves and animation techniques that I hadn’t tried before and so over-all I think it was good practise in animation that I put effort into.

What Would I Do Differently and Why?

One thing I would do differently is I would add more in-between frames to smooth out my animation more, given the chance. This is because some areas of the animation are quite choppy as I was animating frame by frame for the most part, which is a long process that I wanted to speed up by drawing less frames so that I could try to complete the animation for the deadline. If there was no deadline, I would have spent much longer adding in extra frames and refining the animation until I was completely satisfied. This approach to animating would have obviously been much less efficient.

Conclusion

Over all, I am happy with the animation I produced for this brief. It was a good practice in working towards a deadline, and creating multiple animated shots and editing them together in sequence. It also showed me where I can improve my skills as an animator, and helped me to practice my new interest in cinematography.