The Final Project

Before beginning the process, i wanted to make sure the stage size and settings were all correct first. I set the stage size in animate to 1280x720, which is the size for 720p HD. I then quickly created a short animation of a ball changing size and exported it. I then opened this in After Effects and tested it again and the preview seemed to work fine. I then exported this to an MP4 using Adobe Media Encoder.   Following getting the mp4 file, i uploaded this to youtube and the results were promising. There seemed to be no issues with frame drops and the video being cropped. https://youtu.be/Pv2D9zIsGic Overall, i am satisfied with the process i plan to take and know that there should be no issues with the final outcome. 

I am still torn between two ways of creating the animation. One would be more true to my asthetic and one would be a lot easier to work with when animating. It may be that the style i like to do is more suited for illustration then animation and i would have to find a way to include a hint of my style. Below is the first draft i did using watercolour brushes and a watercolour paper background. This isnt a complete version of what i would like but i like its direction illustratively. However, i do not think animating it would be easy and may not be appealing to everyone. I managed to achieve ths by following a tutorial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrGNiDdIR9o&t=319s Below is more of a trational style to animate with block colours and only partial shading. I feel this will be much better to animate with as i do not have to adapt as much. Although this is all still hand drawn on photoshop, it is more relaxed in how its done.

I think in the research process, i got caught up in trying to find a style that i liked and would use in my animation, that i forgot this project was personal and a represenation of what ive been through. It is only through trying out other ways of illustrating that i found myself uncomfortable with them although capable of doing them. This is when i thought back to how id done previous projects and even how i began to design my logo. I love the idea of digital painting. Using a digital simulation to create a painting effect that takes some skill to master in reality. I knew my style is combining both digital and real painting methods. The only issue i would have would be keeping it consistent as i would have to paint various shadows and keep redrawing parts.

Whilst looking for art styles and ways to utilise illustrator, i came across an interesting tutorial on Lynda. It is called " Drawing Vector Graphics: Isometric Illustration". I began to watch the tutoial and thought this could be a good idea for my animation and i began to follow the tutorial and experiment. https://www.lynda.com/Illustrator-tutorials/Drawing-Vector-Graphics-Isometric-Illustration/373329-2.html I began by setting up the actions in order to do an isometric shape in Illustrator. This was easy as long as i followed the steps.    After this, i watched more of the course and decided to see if i could begin drawing a scene to see if it would be suitable for me. I greatly disliked the results and the angles were all wrong for what i wanted to do. There are some things i will take from the course though and try to apply to creating my animation. 

My plan is to try and keep the scene changing to a minimum. This is to ensure i have as much time as possible working on the character animations. I will zoom in to various parts of the scene to focus on whats going on there. This keeps it from looking boring and also saves time on creating more scenes. Im still undecided about what the final part will be but i am happy with the notes i made about it and will add an updated frame once it is done.

Periods have often been a taboo discussion in public with many shying away from even acknowledging their existence. I feel this has a contributing factor to women often staying quiet about their struggles with them and thus not being diagnosed when there are serious issues. Take the movie Carrie for example. Carrie has her period in the shower at school and finds herself the subject of ridicule from the other students. Even her mother thinks shes a sinner and persecutes her for it. In a recent season of RuPauls Drag Race All Stars, drag queen Manila Luzon, planned to wear a dress fitting the runway theme but was not allowed to do so as it was "bad taste". The dress is an obvious refernce to a maxi pad and as Manila writes, "i think it celebrates a perfectly normal human experience!". And that is what it is. A perfectly normal human experience but this is an example of it being seen as something we dont talk about.   With all of that said, there may be cha...

I first tried to look for something simalar to what i am planning to do. The only videos i could find were very clinical. They showed a lot of detail about endometriosis and theres no soft approach to it. I instead tried to look for other instances where it was difficult to talk about the subject but an animation was created to help shed light on the issue. Recently, campaigns to raise awareness of mental health issues has been on the rise. We All Have Mental Health 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxIDKZHW3-E&t=33s   The animation tells a story of a school girl feeling stressed and how she approaches her mother about it. It then goes on to talk about a boy who had great difficulty overcoming his feelings and had problems talking to people about it. The animation itself is quite simple in style and often uses visual symbolism to illustrate what is being narrated. It is about 5 minutes long and tells both stories in an effective amount of time. The target audie...

My final project will consist of: Animation: roughy 2 minutes 30 seconds long. I feel this is enough time to get the message and narrative across without being too much to animate in the time frame. Facebook and YouTube page: Facebook will show updates of the project and share relevant news and facts about endo. YouTube will be the hosting page for the animation. Leaflet: The idea is to have the characters from the animation in the leaflet and explain these are only just a few possible symptoms and even if you feel like what you experience is trivial, get it checked out if you ae unsure. I feel like this is a far amount of work to get done by the deadline as i am used to having 3 assignments simultaniously. Now i have much more experience animating, i should be able to complete all the work.

The base of my animation will be a set of characters interacting in a scene. Creatinga scene isnt a problem but i am unsure of how to animate characters in different software. One peice of software i was looking into using was After Effects. The following is a tutorial i plan to use to create a test character to see if i can work with it and whether it does what i intend it to do. https://www.lynda.com/After-Effects-tutorials/Animating-dialogue/83787/89797-4.html?srchtrk=index%3a1%0alinktypeid%3a2%0aq%3acharacter+animation+after+effects%0apage%3a1%0as%3arelevance%0asa%3atrue%0aproducttypeid%3a2 My thoughts now turn to perhaps creating scenes and animating them accordingly rather then creating a character to copy and paste in. Another tutorial, perhaps much simpler as i already know about creating characters is this from youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQgmXARn8aA