Final Piece

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On this page you'll be able to see my final piece as well as my evaluations of the entire project.

Overall, I'm very happy with my final piece in this project. Animation was something I had never attempted before and knowing that and seeing my Final product, I believe I've learned a lot in this project and I have gained a lot of skills which I will be able to take further in future projects.

Worlds Of Wallace

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Evaluations

Evaluate your investigations into the audio-based requirements of your chosen production in each of its production stages. (Unit 5 LO1 1.1)

In animation, audio is a huge part as every single audio component must be created from scratch. For research into this component, I made sure to focus on the way the audio has to change in order to reflect what is happening on the screen. This was important as a lot of my scenes took place in different locations, which would mean the sounds would have to be different in each of these locations. This research allowed me to get a grasp on what I would need to achieve in order to make my sounds seem realistic within the worlds of the visuals, but additionally, it opened my eyes to a variety of different techniques, all which were available to use if I so decided to. Furthermore, I was able to gain examples of alternative ways to create sound. For example, in one of my references they used the sound of frying bacon to be used as the sound of rain. This more out of the box thinking was a good thing to discover as originally I was only thinking of straight forward ways to make the sound, but sometimes alternative ways are actually better, and I was able to continue this way of thinking later on when it came to my audio production. I think if I were to do this audio research again, I would want to have more focused research into dialogue and the different ways of approaching the recording and editing of that, as I feel this would help my overall understanding and knowledge of audio production. I had never really focused on dialogue in previous projects so I went with the very straightforward approach for it in this project, but now with a better understanding of it, I wish I had done more initial research into it as that would have then allowed me to experiment with it more.

Audio Based investigations

Evaluate your investigations into the visual-based requirements of your chosen production in each of its production stages. (Unit 6 LO1 1.1)

I did quite a lot of research into visual production, as I had never tried to tackle an animation before, and I wanted to be prepared. I started by looking into traditional animation techniques, finding out about the 12 principles of animation, which became very useful later on. This first research allowed me to get a better understanding of how animation actually works, which then allowed me to do further research into other forms of animation. One new form of animation I researched into was rotoscoping. I had previously done a demo focused around rotoscoping, so I knew the basics of it, and especially that I wanted to include it in my piece. This further research into rotoscoping was extremely helpful though, as it allowed me to gain a better grasp of how the technique evolved, as well as discovering ways I could make my own work unique. One of the most helpful parts of this research was finding more pieces of other work, which granted me insight into how other people have created their work, and how I can use their inspirations as a way to fuel my own project moving forward.

I think discovering several different ways to animate is definitely a useful approach to research, especially when considering work later on down the line, as understanding several different mediums keeps my options open, if I ended up changing my mind from my initial idea. Having these alternative methods to hand will allow me to keep myself more flexible until I finalise my idea.

Visual Based investigations

Evaluate the effectiveness of your research activities in support your ideas development (Unit 5 LO1 1.2 / Unit 6 LO1 1.2)

One of the main activities that I underwent to fuel my ideas development was demo work tasks. These allowed me to get hands-on experience with certain production techniques that I may want to use. The two most useful ones of these were on rotoscoping and sound design, which are both crucial parts of my piece. Learning how to actually go through the process of creating these productions and jumping head first into the process was definitely one of the best ways to learn. It meant that any obstacle or problem that I ran into during the demos I would have to solve then and there, which then meant I’d either remember not to make the same mistakes again, or I’d know how to solve them if they ever arose again. To then continue with the hands on approach I did some of my own traditional animation practises and tests. This was super useful, as it allowed me to learn my own technique of animating and to understand how different movement works when having to draw it frame by frame. Especially, I discovered the time it would take to animate my final piece, which helped me to prepare for the work I would have to create in the following weeks.

To then fuel the more theoretical part of my ideas development, I conducted a survey as well as a focus group. The survey was focused around the rough idea of an animation, which allowed me to understand what people liked. This was super helpful as it allowed me to know that the idea I was creating was something that people from a variety of age and gender ranges would all love.

The focus group then allowed me to get a more personal and in depth understanding of what people thought about my final idea. I presented my ideas to a focus group who then asked questions about anything they wanted to know about my piece. One of the best features of the focus group was the people questioning parts of the story I hadn’t considered. For example, they brought up the question of why Wallace is travelling to different worlds instead of just space, or whether the stressed relationship at the beginning is wrapped up or not at the end. These were parts of the story that I hadn’t considered yet and it was great they brought it up. Now that I’ve realised about these features I can continue developing the story in my pre-production stage. They also brought up other features such as the name of Wallace or parts of the other world that I realised I had never justified within my ideas development so having these parts justified and being able to explain them in this focus group was really good and I feel definitely helps to improve my own work. And I think the best part of the focus group was the people challenging me on my own ideas. When working alone, it’s easy to just assume everything you think of works. But having my ideas questioned allows me to not only adapt and improve my own ideas but also see some of the plot holes and things that don’t work in my original idea.

Effectiveness of Research activities

Discuss the effectiveness of your planning and organisation of your production (Unit 5 LO2 2.1 / Unit 6 LO2 2.1)

Pre-production was a hugely important part of the process, especially as animating takes a long time, so planning out my time and what I’m devoting to when was hugely important. In particular, my storyboards and audio script were particularly useful in helping me to understand what my final piece would eventually look and sound like. They were incredibly helpful as they allowed me to see that what I was trying to create was possible. Although the production schedules then allowed me to see the amount of time I would have to devote to this project in order for my idea to come to fruition. But, I was prepared for this hard work so these production schedules just helped me in understanding how I was rationing my time which would help me to work productively and effectively.

I only had three weeks to produce the whole project, with one of these weeks being a holiday. In order to plan my time efficiently, I devoted two of these weeks to visual production and the third week to audio post production. This would allow me to make sure I have enough time to produce all the content I needed to and not to get narrow focused on one particular segment of the process. I feel that all the planning and organisation I have put into my pre-production will allow my production and post production to run smoothly.

Thanks to all my planning my visual production ran very smoothly and I was always either on or ahead of schedule.This allowed me to quite happily get all the visual production completed in its original 2 weeks designated time. One thing I unfortunately did plan wrong with regards to my visual components was the length that the final video would be. Originally, I had predicted it would be about 1:40-1:50 minutes long. However, the more work I did and the further I got through the process the more I realised it was going to be longer than I had planned. In the end, the final product finished at about 2 minutes 30. This is not too much of a problem but it is an interesting observation and an error that I will definitely want to work on in regards to future productions, as accurately knowing the length of a piece will help better prepare me in the earlier stages of production.

For the first half of my audio recording (my dialogue) I was able to stick to my production schedule and complete everything in the designated time frame. However, when it came to the day I had planned to record foley, as well as several days afterward, recording audio was practically impossible as a storm was coming through and any audio I tried to record was extremely bad quality thanks to the wind and rain that would always ruin the sound. This did mean I had to delay my audio recording by a couple of days, but thankfully due to my planning, my audio recording took place while I still had another week of visual production, meaning I still had plenty of time to record foley before it was required for the last week of audio production. And although I had to disband from my original planning, this was a good learning experience as not everything always goes to plan so learning to adapt and work with drastic changes is a skill I am slowly developing and will come in very useful in any future productions.

My audio editing also went decently well, although not quite as well as my visual production. I had given myself one week to complete my audio editing as this was the last week of the project. However, during that week we were informed we were going to be allowed a week’s extension. But, as I had planned to finish by the end of that week, and as I was still on schedule, I decided to stick to my plan and finish my audio editing by the end of that first week. This would then allow me an extra week for double checking all of my work and adding in any extra information I may have missed initially. I did struggle a little bit with audio editing, as it didn’t always sound as I had originally imagined in my head. By the Thursday of the week, I had almost finished my audio editing and I decided to get a couple of other people’s opinions on it, as I realised I had been listening to it over and over for days and so my perception of it was skewed. But getting these other people’s views and opinions on it was really useful, as they said it sounded good, and the things I didn’t like weren’t mentioned. This made me feel a lot more confident and meant when I came to export it on the Friday I was quite proud of what I had produced.

Effectiveness of planning

Evaluate your continued audio and visual skills development. What specific new skills / practises have you learnt as a consequence of undertaking this project? (Unit 5 LO2 2.2 / Unit 6 LO2 2.2)

This was my first project where I delved into the world of animation, meaning I had to completely develop new skills while learning how to produce my final piece. The hardest part was starting and learning how to animate. I tried a couple methods, including, using adobe animate or using photoshop with its video layers. But I wasn’t able to grasp either of these methods and I was really struggling to animate with them. In the end I settled on a method which I knew would work and I’d be good at, but may take slightly more time. This method included drawing all of my frames in Adobe Photoshop and then importing and compiling them inside of Adobe Premiere Pro. I’d had quite a lot of experience with photoshop from GCSE Photography and so I was very comfortable with how it worked and what it could offer me and I knew drawing with it was something I could achieve. I also had experience with premiere from my past projects and all I needed to do was organise the frames in premiere as all the design was in Photoshop so I knew this would be relatively easy to achieve. I had originally thought that this method would take much longer, as I was having to draw out each frame and then export them individually just to compile them again in premiere. However, as I went through the process, it didn’t take as long as I had originally thought, and once I got into the rhythm of it I believe I was able to produce the content quite efficiently. Overall, learning this method of production was super useful, and as I created the method myself I was quite proud of its results. As well as learning this new method, I think the practice and amount of drawing that I had to do for this project has helped improve my drawing skills which will also aid me if I choose to do animation again in future projects.

Regarding my audio skills before this project, they were pretty lacklustre. Near the start of the year, I had missed the lesson on how to use the audio equipment which meant arriving at this project I had little to no experience with audio recording, let alone audio editing. However, during this project, I went through two demo tasks which really helped me in this field of work. The first was the “Toy Story” sound design task. This introduced me to using the equipment and then going in with my recordings and editing them using adobe audition. This demo task was super useful as it allowed me to get hands on with the equipment and learn how to record. And I did make mistakes in this first task, such as not actually using the boom mic and instead only recording on the recorder. But because I made this mistake then it meant I remembered not to make this mistake again, especially during my production.

The second demo task was a scene blocking task, but I used this time to further my knowledge of audio recording as I opted to record the audio for the scene. This meant I gained more use of the zoom recorder and boom mic but also gained additional experience with using the boom pole. This was different from the first demo as this time, I had to be careful about where I held the microphone, to make sure it wasn’t in shot. Additionally, this demo’s audio revolved around dialogue which meant I gained more knowledge of how the mic reacted to dialogue and how to record it well.

These demo tasks then lead to my production where I needed to record dialogue and foley. I used my previous experience from the demo tasks to record these. I was quite happy with my dialogue recording and felt I was able to obtain those recordings quite well. I’m less happy with my Foley recordings. The mic I was using was more suited to dialogue recording than foley, and my foley results ended up being a lot quieter than they sounded while I was recording. The foley was still there and sounded fine but the volume was my major problem. If I was to re-do my audio recording, I would definitely want to retry doing it with a different mic and see if that would change the outcome of my results at all.

However, I could still save these foley recordings using my experience of Adobe Audition from my first demo task. Although it was minimal experience, I had learned the basics of audition, which meant I could expand my knowledge during this post production. There were several things that I wanted to add to my foley such as pitch shifting and slowing or quickening the recording, which I had not tried before. To be able to achieve these, I had to do research online and discover different ways to apply it. Which led to me discovering even more edits I could apply if I needed them. This was extremely helpful and led to me feeling a lot more secure and confident in using Adobe Audition. There were some minimal problems I ran into such as ordering my layers, but none of these problems hindered me too much and I was pretty proud of my final result, and I’m confident if and when I use Audition in the future I’ll be able to use it well and better than I did during this project.

Audio and visual skills development

Reflect on the effectiveness of your production and how meaning is created and supported via your application of audio - visual techniques and practises (Unit 5 LO3 3.1 / Unit 6 LO3 3.1)

My main goal of this project was to learn how to animate as well as developing my skills of animation as well as sound design and editing. Animation was something I had been interested in for a while and something I felt quite passionate about, so using this project as a way to sharpen my skills and finally make a good animation was something I was really looking forward to.

I was extremely proud of my final piece, especially the animated visual components that I had created. As previously stated in some of my other evaluations, I created my own method for animating which in the end went very smoothly. I feel this development and type of animation is able to be reflected in the final piece to the audience, mainly due to me being able to devote more time to each of the durings before having to worry about the animating. I feel this is able to be seen, especially in some of the wider shots, such as the medieval segments, where the background and all the characters each have several aspects to themselves and I feel the audience is able to see this.

I also tried to use the visuals to help engross the audience within the world of the animation. I did this via giving each of the different worlds a very significant design as well as colours, which helped to create a nice contrast between the scenes of the piece. I think this is most obvious within the alien world where the background has a very bright and vibrant colour palette, which contributes to the vibes of that world.

I think the best way I tried to use visuals to impact the audience was through the design of Wallace. It was very important to me that the audience liked Wallace as he is the character that the whole piece revolves around and he’s the only character that stays for the piece, whereas all the other characters revolve around each other. To do this, initially, I made sure to give him a friendly design. The easiest way to do this is to give him soft shapes. Which is why his head is a circle and his body is very soft with no harsh edges. Soft shapes are proven to make a character seem more approachable. For example, spongebob is not a straight square but has quite rounded sides to make him seem more friendly. This is the same approach I took with designing Wallace. I then made sure to give him a friendly face, as well as a soft shaped nose to continue the theme of friendliness, so that I had as much chance to make the audience like him as I could. His colour palette was then created to reflect his alien aspect as well as to make him visually intriguing for the audience. His bright colours would give contrast between him and the other worlds and hopefully make the audience find him more comical.

While the visuals provided the appeal for the audience, I used the audio to help engross the audience into the world of Wallace. The main way I did this was through the use of different soundscapes for each of the worlds Wallace visits. I believe that this helped to create the distinct features that each of the different worlds needed and led to a contrast between them for the audience. Although the soundscapes aren’t the thing the audience should be focusing on, I felt as having them subtly hidden in the background of the audio would help each world feel distinct without having to blast the audience with a bunch of different sounds. I felt the subtler approach was the best way to go and I hope this is reflected in the final piece.

The dialogue was extremely important in conveying character to the audience. Especially as well as his design, the voice was important in building up the character of Wallace. It was important to me that Wallace didn’t just have a normal person's voice as I feel this would take away from the alien side of Wallace as well as the sci-fi aspect of the whole piece. Capturing the right personality in his voice was absolutely vital. To do this I used one of my friends who I knew was very good at doing a wide range of weird voices. He was able to do exactly what I was aiming for and I was extremely happy with the final result. From the few people that I showed my work in progress to, several of them said that the voice fit his character very well which I was really happy about. A couple of them said that it wasn’t what they expected but still thought it fit, but I feel it’s good to have a range of opinions as long as the majority of them came down to the fact that they did like the voice.

I did not run into too many major problems in this project, but I feel the main thing I’ve learned from it is how long animation and it’s audio takes. As well as the effort that it requires. I knew going in that animation would take a while, but I don’t think I could’ve been prepared for how long it really does take. Luckily, I had enough time to complete my animation but from this experience I know that if I wanted to do animation again and make it even better or longer, I could more realistically plan and especially schedule the work I would need to do. So gaining this knowledge now is very useful, especially as I’m considering possibly doing animation for my final major project.

If I was to do this project again, I honestly don’t think that there is much I would want to change. I was extremely happy with my final project, especially regarding the visual aspects. I think if I was looking for something that I would want to improve with a second go, it would most likely be my audio. I was happy with my final audio but with the experience I gained from doing it this time, especially with the recordings of the foley, I would make sure to gain even more foley a second time over. I would especially make sure to do more practices of sound effects before recording the final pieces, as there were a couple of recordings which didn’t work quite as I expected them to when it came to editing them in the late process of the piece. But on the whole I’m really proud of this project and I feel all the work I put into it is definitely shown in my final piece.