Evaluation (open project)

for the past, 6-8 weeks i have been working on a project which was all to do with fantasy, an open project. it was called an open project we could do anything we wanted ( that we learnt about the past year) and use it to create something that revolves around fantasy ( you could only pick what you wanted to do if your work was up to date) for my project i created a 23 second animation of an elf girl singing a song in the Hylian language ( the language from legend of zelda), i wanted the animation to contain not only fantasy characters, but to also have a holy feel to it, which is what the song added, also having a song in a different made up language ( by the game creators)(i think it's made up..) makes it even more fantasy like in my opinion.

the animation starts with the girl opening her eyes while the wind blows her hair softly, it soon zooms out as she begins to sing and put her hands into a preying position, the camera angle changes, and she extends one of her hands outwards, again the camera angle changes, this time to a full body shot, where you can see all of her clothing, she is still singing with one hand stretched out, and near the end, colour begins to fade in. it's only black and white to start with but i thought adding alot of colour would make it alot more complicated for me.

for most of my time i was creating designs, not only for the animation, but for everything else, because before i decided on making an animation, i thought it would be best to come up with sketches and ideas for all the different things in which i could have used to work on (e.g. 3D model, 3D game environment, 2d game etc etc) this way i would have a good idea and knowledge on all the things, that way i wouldn't really have a hard time deciding on what i wanted to do when it came down to actually creating the main piece of the project. after i finally decided to do a 2D animation ( as i dislike 3d i did 2d)  i worked mainly on the character design and what they would be doing, i came up with 3 different stories, and finally decided on this one, as i like the idea of making my character sing a song in another language, i also then decided on 3 different songs, but i picked the goddesses song from the legend of zelda game skyward sword as it was the most interesting to me. it was hard trying to get the mouth movements good enough for the song, but i did my best and got it decent enough.


i think overall for the animation, it went pretty well, it did take a while for me to do it, and i did have a few mistakes here and there, but i think it went great, it turned out how i wanted and the lip syncing is decent enough, i would have liked to add more detail but that would have taken alot more time and i may not have been able to do much design work if that was the case, also the frame rate for the animation is quite low, which is disappointing, however this is something in which i can improve one if i were to ever create an animation again in the future, over all though for a second time animation, i think the frame rate is good enough.





for design work, i did quite alot of designing for all the different areas, but i also did quite alot for the over all animation, especially when it came to designing the outfit for the character, that was the main part as you could basically only see the character, i didn't give the animation a setting as i liked it more plain and black and white, but at the end it reveals the elf standing on a grey large stone which appears to be in a cloudless blue sky, so that's possibly the only scenery for the animation. so i didn't do any main planning for the scenery for the animation as i didn't really want any.

 the design work took almost all of my time, I'm surprised i even got the animation done, due to some of the detail i put into the design work, but at least i was able to use 3 different medias, which were: traditional, digital, and copic markers, i got the idea of digital from a recent artist i was researching about ( you can find it in my artist research) finding certain artists to research about wasn't easy as alot of them didn't catch my eye, howe
ver the ones i found did, it was only 2, but 2 is enough for the inspiration i got off of them.

overall i think this project was great, it was a good idea to let us do what ever we wanted with the idea of fantasy because that means our minds can wonder into all sorts of directions, because fantasy is a genre where anything is possible, which makes this project fun and interesting, probably one of my favoured projects within the lot.