James Wright - Digital Media

I feel like i have definitely developed some new skills during this module (i'm aware that this was the entire point though). I now have a very strange 'love/hate' relationship with animation. I love to see the final piece and loved developing the characters and drawing my storyboards. However, the actual act of animating was pretty intense. Being sat two inches away from a computer screen for like 3 weeks isnt cool. I'd like to try and do some more animation but use the computer for producing the movement alone, possibly using collage or something like that.

ANYWAY. Silent movie might be pretty bare development-wise but i had most of the final ideas as initial ideas and it was just a case of knocking out the animation. I'm very happy with it overall - especially the pop's (i've had a lot of lovely comments about them), but feel like i could have been a bit more inventive with confused and possibly been more accurate with the rhythm of rhythm (hoho). Ultimately, the combination of the three words at once in the frame pretty works well so i'm a happy bunny, even if i do get a headache from watching too much happening at once on the screen. As usual, "limited colour palette" translates as "black, white and red" to me, but they are probably the most effective colours to use anyway. If i was to reproduce the Silent Movie, i would include appropriate typography for each word and not just rely on the animating to communicate meaning (even though this worked pretty well in the end).

Best / Worst.

Worst accents in films! I had a lot of fun coming up with contenders for the animation, and then designing bodies for each character to be combined with screenshots of their heads. MY drawing style is particularly apparent in my charcters, which is something i thought fred would stab me about, but after drawing them and whacking them into illustrator i think that they're become more refined, even though they are extremely simplistic and pretty funny (which communicates the tone of the animation perfectly). The animating process was incredibly straight forward and, even though i say so myself, i think really got the hang of mimicking human movement using blocks of colour. This was mainly due to my idea of separating the body parts, moving anchor points to match joints and not making things too refined (which is typical James Wright Lo-Fi nonsense).

I am very happy with my final animation. I think the colours chosen are extremely appropriate and not TOO cartoony, but just cartoony enough. I knew i was going to use Guns Of Navarone for music as soon as i knew what my style was going to be. That bouncing happy go lucky feel of the song matches the tone i wanted to convey perfectly. It was a bit of a pain cutting out 10 seconds or so of the song though but ultimately, I'm happy. There are a couple of annoying niggles though - i wish i could have got the type and quotes to look well enough to actually do something with them. Also, more research could have gone into typography for the animation's title and countdown sequence. I still dont understand why we had to include the countdown. No TV programmes about countdowns have a timer in the introduction. Not one. Who's idea was it to have to have it? cos its a daft one. Also, if given more time, i would have made the more simple animations more complex (Mel playing bagpipes or such like), and maybe included things such as snow for Brad Pitt's mountain climbing scene and a rope attached to his grappling hook (i couldnt get my head around that at all!).

Iweb was a bit of a nightmare, especially since the version i have on my computer is like 3 years old and absolute rubbish and i get the most work done during the night when college is closed (i.e. i ended up borrowing friend's computers). This led to minor complications, which led to me making the iweb as simple as humanly possible. Pretty much everything on there is a default but i dont think that that is an issue since all my work is up there (at least i fuckign hope it is!) and my layouts are pretty straightforward. The navigation of the page was very logical to me and when i asked people to have a go they thought so as well. There are a couple of pages where you have to use the navigation bar to get back to the previous page but at least its definitely possible.I like the fact that iweb is so easy to use, but it has a nasty habit of crashing when you havent saved for a while. ah well, its all done now. I would like to revamp my iweb, make it a little fancier to look at and so on but it does the job as it is (i hope) so all is good in the hood.

I really like digital media, i just hate computers, ok?