Animation evaluation worksheet:

embed this in your EVALUATION page so it can be read clearly.

2 3:3.2 Evaluate the effectiveness of design and research tools, methods and skills to develop ideas for creative media production

5 3:3.1. Analyse the effectiveness of solutions to an audio based problem in creative media production.

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Animation evaluation/reflection questions

For this task, take your time and think about your experiences of this assignment.
You must answer ALL of these in order to pass this section.
Your answers should be at least 2-3 lines long for each question in order to pass.

Task 1/3: Reflect on your own research. (U2 3:3.2)

This is about the three worksheets you did as well as anything you have added to your production blog by week, such
as learning about Phonemes, facial structure or anything else you feel is relevant.

I did many things in this

What did you use from your
research that helped you?
animation which I took from my
research. I used the idea of the
“Maxilla” and the “Mandible” as
it helped me make the mouth
shapes for my lip syncing since
the maxilla doesn’t move whilst
talking however the mandible
does. This is shown throughout
my animation. I completely forgot
about this at the beginning
however thankfully I realised
before I got too far into my animation and was able to change it before any major damage
was done to my drawings and the mouth shapes.

In my animation I also used the idea of the “key, breakdown, extreme” theory to make my
characters blink. This was very helpful as it created a smoother blink for my characters and
made the characters more human and brought them to life. I feel like it made my animation
better overall.
Honestly, I did not purposely use the perspective types in my work since my animation was
2d and I did not think I would have enough time/enough skill to use perspective that wasn’t
front-on to the characters. I don’t feel like this changed the quality of the work however if I
had more time, I might’ve been more inclined in trying out one of the perspectives (perhaps
in a cutaway shot?).

Furthermore, I didn’t immediately create a colour palette for the work at all and just decided
upon colours when it came to it and decides upon colours that I thought fit the background
What did you discard and why?
and how I wanted to portray the characters themselves.

Finally, I didn’t really use my primary research at all since I didn’t think my animation was
serious enough (this is shown through the exaggerated character drawings) and didn’t
necessarily want to make the audience feel “sad” or “happy” due to this. If I was to make a
more serious animation I might’ve considered perhaps adding a theme of “betrayal or one
personal denying another person so that disconnection is made” however I don’t think that
this fits my animation at all.

What else would it have been
more useful to know from your
research if you did it again?
If I were to do my animation again, there’s not much more research that I would’ve done
apart from a few things. I think sometimes my drawings styles don’t completely match so I
would’ve liked to do a little bit more research into the drawings of characters/backgrounds
that match and create an idea of what I’d like my animation to look like before I make it. For
example, my sun and my background don’t look alike and that they should exist in the same
“universe” so I would’ve perhaps researched more suns/backgrounds that look similar. I feel
like my animation would’ve been more fine-polished if I actually had characters with similar
styles unlike the drawings I did here.

To find this out I would do a more in-depth analysis on suns/clouds/backgrounds from

different animations, and it would be secondary research in this situation. I did do a little
secondary research mentioning suns/clouds/backgrounds that I particularly like from
different animations however I feel like they weren’t presenting the way I wanted to present
my animation. For example, in my research

How would you find this out

(P/S/Q/Q)?*

For example, the sun in Peppa Pig was too simple and the sun from SpongeBob was too
detailed and out of my level. I don’t particularly like my sun and think it could look better and
I think more secondary research would’ve helped me significantly to make a better looking
sun.
*primary/secondary/qualitative/quantitative

Task 2/3: Reflect on your own design, practical skills and build. (U2 3:3.2)
This is about the practical skills you learnt each week. Feel free to go back over the Animation Teams channel if it
helps you remember. Answer each question, including any relevant screen grabs.

I did many things in this animation which I took from my research. In my opinion, the main one that I
used from the research was the ability to lip sync and the method of doing that via frame picker. The
research of the lip syncing really helped bring my sun and cloud to life and I think that this significantly
helped my animation become the best that I could make it.

I of course also used motion tweening throughout multiple scenes in my animation, most prominent
when the cloud was moving around the scene making the cloud worried. I think doing prior research
really helped and I
feel like my
What did you use from your
research
practical skills lessons that
beforehand
helped you?
created a piece of
work which
otherwise
wouldn’t have been
great quality
however now I’m
happy with what
I made.

What did you discard and why?
What would you now include
and why?
What practical skills would you
like to revisit if you did it again?
Are there any new ones you
think would be useful for this
project?
How does your final animation
compare to professional
examples? Give at least one
positive and one thing you
would focus on improving.
Immediately, the main thing that I didn’t do and despite
it being minor caused a little bit more hassle than it was
worth and that was naming the keyframes. It
would’ve been useful to label the keyframes for the
mouth shapes for lip syncing however I wasn’t sure
how I would manage that and couldn’t figure out how to
do it/find a tutorial online so I just kept a
reference image up, so I knew which one it was in order
to lip sync.
Furthermore, I didn’t use mask layers for the sun, perhaps going behind the mountain to hide away
from the cloud (this was one of my initial ideas) which perhaps would’ve improved the quality of my
animation. Honestly, I discarded this because I completely forgot that it was a feature and looking back
on this feedback sheet I am wondering whether I should’ve done it – I might try it in my next
assignment if I see it as necessary.
Finally, I also didn’t use a simple lighting flash for the cloud which one again would’ve added more
detail to the animation itself and would’ve been very simple to do – just adding a white flash on the
whole screen once the lightning strike would’ve happened.
Like I mentioned above, I would’ve preferred to add mask layers for the sun going behind the mountain
and maybe a simple flash for the cloud. The reason why I would now like to include it if I was to do it
again was simply because I didn’t have the idea at the time and now think that it would be good to add
more detail. From what I can see from the lessons/tutorials it doesn’t look too difficult so I’m a little
disappointed that I forgot about them and didn’t attempt them during my animation however I am
happy with what I produced nonetheless.
For the practical skills I would like to revisit the tweening/keyframes in more detail because during my
animation I found that I was often finding myself doing trial and error when trying to remove a motion
tween and also trying to convert motion tween keyframes into normal keyframes which I can imagine
wasted some time. I also wasn’t sure how to do lip syncing whilst a tween was occurring, so it would’ve
been useful to pursue that further. I noticed after my animation that there was a tutorial that I missed
for this so it was my own fault however I’d like to go into more detail in it overall anyways.
Personally, I think if we went into the theory behind drawing things like we did for the perspective
types my animation would’ve come out a little better because I’d have more theory behind the
drawings and they may have been better. I think I did decently well without much skill/knowledge of
drawing and it suits the theme that I’m going for but I’d like to explore it further for future projects.
Speaking of future projects, I’d like to use a bit more colour theory for my projects in order to make my
audience feel certain things so if we go into more depth about the theory behind colour it would create
better pieces of work for the future projects.
I personally quite like my final animation however there is some things that I would like to focus on
improving and I’m going to be comparing my work to the work of the University of Hertfordshire in
2008 and their feel for the animation. Link
Starting off with what I think was good about my animation is the general storyline and the layout of
my animation. I think I laid out my animation fairly well with something happening most of the time on
screen so that the audience doesn’t lose retention and is focused on the animation most of the time. I
think my layout of where everything is on the screen is good, particularly where the characters
themselves are (the cloud
coming in from the left, the
sun being high and central
and the narrator being the
least important character
on screen, not overall, is in
the bottom left). I also
quite like how they all are
presented on screen
through nothing more than
their facial expressions and
the way they act on screen.
Finally, the last thing I like
about my animation is the effects that I added like the vignette (shown in the image) which really adds
more tension than you’d expect and shows how the cloud makes everything worse. Not a major detail
 but I still like it.

Alternatively, there’s also a few things that I’d like to change. Firstly, It’d have to be the general design
of the animation. Of course I know it’s not going to be the best drawings in the world but I think I
could’ve improved how I came at it. I think I came at the animation quite negatively with not much
confidence so I made the drawings too simple. If I was to redesign the clouds Id certainly make them
more fluffy like the ones in the animation from the University of Hertfordshire in 2008 where they
made the clouds more fluffy and not so sharp like I did myself. I don’t think mine looks ugly but if I
were
to

improve it I’d do it this way.

Furthermore, if I was to improve my animation in a different way it would be to improve the minor
details that most people wouldn’t notice just to make it more fine polished. An example of this was the
mouth on the sun after tweening. Oftentimes, the mouth wouldn’t be exactly where I placed it before
so I would like to make it more consistent just to make it a little nicer.

Task 3/3: Reflect on your audio ideas and work. (U5 3:3.1)
This is about the audio skills you learnt each week. Feel free to go back over the Animation Teams channel if it helps
you remember. Answer each question, including any relevant screen grabs.

What did you use from your From our audio lessons I took different things from it. Firstly, I took recommendations for what

audio skills lessons that helped
you?
What did you discard and why?
What would you now include and
why?
What audio skills would you like
to revisit if you did it again?
Are there any new ones you think
would be useful for this project?
How does your final audio
compare to professional
examples? Give at least one
positive and one thing you would
focus on improving.
sounds I should put into my animation and would work the most as I don’t think there’s much you
can add to the animation sound itself. The one that was recommended to me the most was the
crowd noise which I added to at the start of my animation.
I also used the knowledge of how to import audio itself into Animate because I didn’t have any
idea of how to put it into Animate prior to this assignment so I had to learn through these lessons.
Furthermore, I took the theory from the “exploring sound” worksheet to add a score to a scene
during my animation to fit the mood and atmosphere that I was going for. This was helpful in
order for me to find the specific music that I wanted to source from the internet and to put into
my work.
I personally didn’t really edit my audio clips in Premiere Pro when editing the audio and effects
during the editing process at the end. I didn’t do this because I didn’t feel it was necessary due to
the sound being exactly what I wanted. If I really wanted to do this, I guess I could’ve made the
“yippee” higher pitched in order to make it blend with the background but I really do not feel like
this is completely necessary for what I was aiming to do.
If I was to do the audio again, I would personally record on something with a higher quality
microphone than my phone however I think that itself did the job perfectly for what I needed but
if I wanted to take it that one step further I needed to use a better microphone as its slightly clear
in the opening title that the quality isn’t the greatest that I could’ve achieved. I could’ve asked the
college for some recording equipment however due to time restraints I decided that my phone
would be the best thing to do in this situation and honestly it did perfectly fine and I would only
change it if I had more time to get my audio perfect.
If we were to revisit the audio skills lessons that we did I think I’d most like to revisit the audio
effects themselves and how to use them to make something specific that we might be looking for.
In my animation I didn’t edit the sound that greatly (other than the volume) so I think if we went
into more depth next-time about the effects that we can apply onto our sound clips it would be
good to do to go that one step above again.
I’d like to learn how specific audio could make an audience feel. For example, specific instruments
and their effects upon the audience are something that I’d like to look at in order to get my
audience on a later project to feel someway that we as the creator want them to feel – whether
this is happiness, anger or sadness it’d be interesting to see. There’s obvious and cliché examples
like soft piano for sad scenes however I’d like to see more abstract ones that would set our work
apart from the cliché’s.
I do think my audio is of good standard however I don’t feel it’s the best that I could do in my
animation so here’s what I like about it and what I think I could improve about it. I’ll be comparing
it to “My Moon”. Link
Starting off I’m going to be talking about what I liked about my sound design. Firstly, I think the
best part about my whole entire audio is the entrance where I gathered a few people to read out
the title card “sun and cloud”. I think it adds quite a lot because when I had the title card in
silence there was an emptiness around it and that sound alone fills that hole. It instantly shows
that this animation is made for children and is a somewhat wholesome story that may have a
deeper undertone. Either way, I think that this is the best part of audio in my animation and I
think it was a good idea to add.
Furthermore, I like my music that I added on the suspenseful and intense scene of the cloud first
entering the scene as it clearly shows the clouds intentions and how menacing it’s trying to be.
You can tell this without seeing the animation purely through the music, voice and sound effects
which I think is perfect for this type of animation. This type of animation that I did for this
assignment requires simple thinking without going too deep into the background of the
characters with a simple storyline.
However, I do think that there’s some things about my audio that could be improved. Firstly, I
think the music for the sun wasn’t exactly what I trying to present across to my audience so I
think I would’ve presented the sun with music similar to the music used in “my moon”. The music
is linked here. This music clearly shows the sun as a majestic being with knowledge and power
much like the sun in my animation so I think that this music is better suited for my animation and
I think if I was to it again, I would replace the music in the original with something more similar to
this.