Creating my final stings

I created my final stings under camera in dragon frame with a bit of frame by frame with a light box underneath. This approach suited me well, it allowed me to try and add lots of expressive texture as movement, and it was okay to make some mistakes as I could just work with these and work them into my drawings as they progressed. The finished result is quite imperfect but this works with the way that I have gone about drawing them, the characters have a slightly greater sense of movement. I didn't really get them to move or do anything as exciting or impressive as I might have liked, but to add much more complication to the image sequence might not have come out very well in such a short space of viewing time as I had. 

The backgrounds and textures that I used could be better, it would have been cool if I could have had time to create some more relevant back grounds for what was going on for each character. I would have liked to have developed perhaps some looser and more expressive scenes to go into the background so as not to be over complicated. Unfortunately I wasn't so clever and far enough ahead  to develop these :(. Maybe it would have over complicated the image anyway...

My final stings are quite shoddy, and this is partly down to my struggling abilities with after effects, I need to have a lot more practice with that software. I am however quite pleased with the music, I think that it just makes the animations and gives it the perfect humorous and a bit mad vibes that I wanted. I spent quite a lot of time editing the music and trying to pick the perfect sections the accent what was going on in the image sequence. I hope that people will watch these and take joy in the strangeness of them, I kind of want people to laugh at them in a good way!

I had many practice attempts at trying to get the right sort of had written font for the text:

Story Boarding:

My story boards were very sketchy, but I made one A3 page like this for each of my stings which roughly detailed and described how my drawings for them would go. I found these much more natural to make than filling in lots of boxes.

As I was creating each sting in dragon frame I would use scrap bits of paper to roughly lay out and test where and how they would look, adjusting them as I checked them on screen.

After Effects

My documentation of completing my stings in aftereffects this final decision making process is not top notch picture wise - the computer wouldn't let me screen grab any frames to sho  w on here.

But I just played about with stretching out the length of them a bit, so that some of the detail was easier to notice, and to edit the levels of them so that they were much more clear. I did quite a lot with the editing of the hue and saturation as well, to try and get the right feel to them. I had a go at making it zoom in and out of some bits of my drawings, but this made them even busier, and made it hard to pick up all of the detail. I would have liked to have learnt how to speed up some bits of my animations and slow it down in others though. With regards to the finish of these, it really could be a lot better, but since these are my first animations and I think the overall effect just about works I'm not too disappointed in them!

Animating is such an interesting process, it really makes you consider how much a simple brush stroke can change the whole tone and feel of your drawing - and how much you can communicate with just simple drawings. It has made me I think slightly more aware of how to try to get an image to communicate, for example what sort of impressions that they would give an onlooker - what I would want them to think is going on, like with the expressions of my characters etc.