Introduction
This blog post is for me to share a reflection on my final submitted work for the A2 Culture brief. The animation that I created for this brief is posted before the introduction to this blog.
What went well?
I think that my animation re-creates the look of the original Mobile Suit Gundam series that I was going for quite well.
The colours I used were very similar to the original colours used in the show, the white on the arms, legs and head of the gundam is actually a light green colour, which I think helps it to contrast from the dark blue background without being too bright. The same is true for the grey on the hands of the gundam – it is actually a dark green colour, but blends well with the other colours to create an over all look and palette.
The brush that I used was a simple line brush that had a size only a few pixels large. This helped to give my animation the same look as Mobile Suit Gundam and other old shows, which were traditionally animated using paint on glass cels. It mimics a traditional look, despite being made on a computer.
The background that I created takes inspiration from a lot of the space backgrounds seen in the show. Rather than black, the show uses a dark blue colour to represent space to make the animation more visually interesting. I used dark blue also in creating this background, as you can see. I also created the background in a style similar to that of the show: in traditionally animated shows, the backgrounds are painted in their entirity physically behind what is going on in the foreground, and so you can change out different cels and make characters move in front of the background without painting the background onto every cel. For my background, I used more painterly brushes and techniques to build up different areas of light and dark colour which made it look more like a painting, rather than just a dark blue solid backdrop. I also created a circular spiral shape using the colours and stars, which frames the central figure of the Gundam in the shot and draws attention to it.
What could be improved on, and what would I do differently?
I think that the movement in this animation looks a little stuttery – this is because I used very little frames when animating the different movements that the character makes, and so the final animation seems more like an animatic – where the character sort of jumps from position to position a little bit. To improve on this, I would add more in-between frames between my key frames, and adjust my key frames to different times in the sequence to create a more fluid motion.
I also think that the character looks static. There is not much movement between different poses, or movement of parts of the body other than the left arm. To fix this, I would add some new action poses for the character to move into to make the animation more dynamic.
Another thing that I would perhaps do differently would be to use a different software for animating in. I used procreate on my ipad, and it isn’t really suited for more in depth animations like this. I think it made the process longer because it is not suited, and I also had to learn some new features of the software. I am glad that I did this however, as now I know more about procreate.