Final Animated Sting

Here is my completed animated sting for this module:


Strengths

I am really proud of what I was able to achieve with my animated sting. I invested a lot of time into learning Adobe After Effects, knowing I would struggle if not and this really paid off enabling me to try new things, be free with it and create a lot of movement and interesting visuals throughout.

I feel my animation clearly links in with the printed part of my submission due to how i chose to animate one of my final prints, and managed to achieve everything i wanted too from my storyboard through to the end result. I kept my animation consistent with the digital printed part of my final pieces: a black and white linocut print with a gold sun featuring in the background. The font i used for the text that appears at the end of the sting also links with the font I have used for the presentation envelopes which house my final prints. I love it when everything is consistent and feels part of a set and body for work, and i feel i have done my best to achieve this.

I really like my choice in soundtrack and feel this adds a lot to the way the animation comes across to the viewer. Lighthearted, carefree, pleasant to listen too and let the visuals speak for themselves.

My choice in author - Italo Calvino - and his book Invisible Cities made wanting to animate my visual response really key to rounding off the cross-platform part of this module. The story itself is so full of life and imagination, I often imagined scenes such as what I was able to create with my sting, whilst reading the book, which is a great achievement for me. I wanted to bring one of my compositions to life, creating a world reflective of a city from the novel. I had an idea and set out to create just that, which i feel i did with no compromises.


Weaknesses

Animating my print was really difficult to get my head around. A lot of time was spend dividing up my final print into all the layers I needed, and with a flat A2 image, this meant lots of fixing different layers so that when applied on top of each other, elements wouldn't be repeated underneath or missing altogether when layers above the background began to move.

I wish i had given myself even more time to play around with the image and After effects. I am a little unhappy at the pace of the whole sting, which despite a long time invested, still seems extremely fast to the viewer. This is mainly due to my idea and what I wanted to create. I wanted my whole final print to be present throughout the animation, due to the amount of time invested in the print itself and wanting to display that to the audience. 

Having the print pan up throughout the animation was the only way I could see to achieve this, and only having 15 seconds to complete this pan, plus enter the frame and leave, is not long at all making the whole movement seem rushed. If the sting was double the time, say 30seconds, I feel that the whole animation would have a lot more of a relaxed feel to it, giving the audience time to actually see all of the different elements moving, increasing in scale, whizzing out of the frame etc.