EVALUATION OF MY ANIMATION: “COLIN THE AARDVARK”

Joshua Matthews

TECHNICAL QUALITY

Walk Cycles -I thought my walk cycle was fairly clear and accurate providing you look at it as a simple, deliberately rugged animation rather than a 3D, modernised piece. It’s slightly choppy and jumpy but this could be disguised as my character’s ‘swagger’.

Parallax Scrolling -

Despite finding it surprisingly hard to originally accomplish correctly, I was actually quite proud of my final background and the way it moved. It runs quite smoothly and it is clearly laid out in my opinion. The arid ground and grass (Layer 3) was by far the easiest part to scroll. I found it easy to move it at consistent speed, as there was nothing for it to be up against. As I travelled back layer, it became harder to keep the scrolling speeds consistent but I managed to blend them well enough in the end.

Jerky Motion -

There was a lot of messy movements in my animation and honestly, they weren’t all meant to be there. I originally planned to put a few minor jerks in order to add to the scribbly tone that I was looking to use in this animation but I felt I used too many in the end. Examples - Colin kicking the Hippo, Colin on his mobile phone.

Shot Types -

I only perceived Colin from one angle in my animation, which I regret. It looks very amateur and basic and I was going for simple, not necessarily basic. I was, however quite pleased with close up shots of both Colin and the Ant, in particular, as they added more detail to the individual characters which I had struggled to add in others parts in the animation.

CREATIVE QUALITY

Characterisation -

Out of the three characters I created for the animation (Colin,Hippo and Ant), I felt that Ant had the best perceived characteristics. Despite the fact that Colin was not only the main character of the animation but also had by far the best walk cycle, Ant held clearer and memorable sound bytes and therefore, in a way, ‘stole the show’

Script -

I didn’t really provide much of a script at all for the animation and I regret this. However, I decided, at pretty much the ‘last minute’, that the animation would be more effective as a Tom & Jerry like, speechless cartoon. The lack of sentences and the abundance of novelty sound effects complements the immature humour and the entire childish nature of the animation and story.

PROFESSIONALS: INFLUENCES AND COMPARISONS

With Colin the Aardvark, I originally intended to combine different styles used in two different professional ; The sketchy, rough drawings of Danny Antonucci, creator of Cartoon Network’s Ed, Edd & Eddy and the clean, smooth movements used by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park.

I felt my drawings could’ve looked more like Antonucci’s if I had been a little less rough with the drawings and their brush strokes yet it’s probably quite clear to see where I might’ve been coming from with them. In Colin’s walk cycle, I drew his hair in a slightly different shape every frame and therefore, it gave off a broiling effect. I also used minimal frames in the walk cycle to enable this effect.

My South Park-style, After Effects, animating technique didn’t entirely work out the way I had originally intended. The slow, careful movements, in my eyes, proved to be too slow and, as a result, I struggled to make the sound effects as effective as I perhaps could’ve if the character’s were moving just that little bit faster.

Overall, I felt that the combination of the two styles wasn’t as good as I had previously expected and maybe it would’ve been better if I had just used Antonucci’s broiling animation style.

APPEAL TO TARGET AUDIENCE

At first, I was aiming my animation at predominantly teenage audience, mostly made up of people my age. I was intending to perceive Colin the Aardvark as a children’s cartoon and then surprise my older audience with some mature humour. However, once I began drawing my animation, I decided that it would be more convenient and easier to just simply make my piece a children’s animation.

Humour -

The humour I used in my cartoon is simple yet effective. “Slapstick” if you like. It contains falling over, comical yet light violence and some interesting facial expressions that hold the ability to entertain children despite the fact that none of them necessarily need to contain any speech.

Characters -

The characters are of random yet logical species that relate to their setting and yet are capable of surprising a viewer at first glance. They move in a exaggerated and somewhat clumsy manner to ensure that the viewer doesn't

get bored at any point. The Length is kept fairly short for this reason.

Visuals -

My titles and credits were created to look extremely informal to match the drawings of the cartoon. The names and nouns are written, by hand, in a style that’s clear and visible but also a little scruffy.

SOFTWAREPhotoshop

I used a Wacom graphics tablet with Adobe Photoshop to create my drawings and captions by hand. I felt that this was probably the easiest software to use overall as I was not required the know as many shortcuts for it compared to other software such as After Effects. In Photoshop, I used a size 28 rough brush to draw out my characters in a dark grey colour scheme and then colour them differently in another layer.

After Effects

I used After Effects to animate my characters using keyframes. I found this much harder to operate than Photoshop, as it was easier to make mistakes such as opening unwanted layers or clicking unnecessary tools and ultimately, messing up the entire animation. I felt the hardest part of the entire creation process was importing my initial walk cycle of Colin into the program from Photoshop, as I struggled to push the frames close together in the timeline so that the cycle would flow properly.

Final Cut Express

I edited my piece using Final Cut and I had very few problems with it. I decided that when I got to the stage of using this software, I wanted to add as much African music to the animation as possible, to add some life and fullness to it. I searched google for “royalty free african music” and tried to skip the first five results, to avoid using familiar music. Once I had found a site, I also skipped a few results for the same reason.

In final cut, I used the preview editor to zoom into some of my footage, to make whatever the character was doing more clear to the viewers.