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Evaluation

Context & Research

  • Before I could begin producing or even planning what animation I wanted to create, I had to understand what sort of animation I was making. For the end product to look well thought out and motivational to a female audience, I had to do a lot of research on the topic of women in sports. The first thing I did was look at other examples of professional campaign videos on women in sports. I analysed videos and their methods of encouraging girls to continue their dreams of being athletes, and I analysed posters/artwork and looked at the stylistic choices made to motivate their audience. Doing this made me realise what I was supposed to produce for this project and gave me ideas of what the end result may look like.

  • After my contextual research I went onto doing some primary and secondary research. At the time my focus was on getting more girls to want to become athletes, so my first piece of research was why girls were dropping out of sports in the first place. I found a reliable article that was based on this topic and made sure to analysis it thoroughly, finding any point that sounded interesting to me. From there I found out that Puberty/Periods was one of the biggest reasons as to why young girls stopped wanting to play sports, and so, interested by this point, I went further to research more of the effects of Puberty for women when it came to being an athlete. My interest in researching the effects of Puberty for female athletes is what allowed me to create an animation that touched on this topic. As I found out that this topic wasn’t so much talked about, and that girls weren’t encouraged/supported enough to play sports when they were younger, I wanted to dedicate my short animation to this topic. Through my research I created a story that was original and meaningful.

  • Although I did do more than enough research for my project, I feel as though I didn’t have various pieces of research on different points. My research mainly centered around Puberty/periods; I stuck with the one subject I found without branching out and doing various research on other potential subjects. My lack of varied research wouldn’t be so good for a professional setting where you’re expected to come up with various ideas; and so this is a skill I must work on. I shouldn’t be so comfortable with the one idea I have.

  • Other than that, I think I definitely did a lot of researching to come up with my product. One piece of research I did that really helped me push my final idea was the Ted Talk I watched by Stacy T Sims. Hearing her talk about how Women's biology wasn’t as important when it came to physiology research for sports, and that some women struggled to train for sport with their periods, made me look even more to the topic of young girls getting the support they need when playing sports. Mixing the issue of girls not being encouraged as much as boys (while teenagers) to play sports, and how puberty is one of the main reasons girls drop out of sports, I created an animation idea that could focus on both these subjects.

Primary Feedback

  • After finally finishing the project and uploading my animation, I sought out some more feedback from my audience. During the entire process of this project I collected a lot of advice and opinions from my peers and those who fit within the target audience. Getting feedback after the production of something is something that always happens in a professional/industry setting; so to get a better feel of professionalism I created another survey with meaningful questions, hoping to get feedback on what was good and what needed to be improved in my animation.

  • The first question I asked was what they thought the message of my animation was about. Luckily my detailed planning shined through with this question as it seemed everyone had gotten the meaning behind my animation, with most of the comments saying “ family and friends can be an important and helpful support networks to encourage girls to play sport.” After explaining the message as a whole these were the following results:

  • Knowing that the majority thought all my messages were clear really helped solidify my thoughts about my skills in storytelling.

  • I also asked if they thought my animation could encourage teenagers and preteens to continue their dreams of becoming an athlete, seeing as my targeted age range was 12-17 and here are the responses:

  • Not only did I make sure to find out my audiences thoughts on my storytelling, but I also sought to find out what they thought about my animation skills. I personally realised that the animation wasn’t done to the best of my ability due to the amount of time I had and my below average skill at animating, however collecting feedback on this subject will definitely help me out in the future. I made sure to compare my work to 2 professional animations I found based around promoting sports.

  • Here are the results to my questions that had my audience compare my animation with the professional examples in terms of storytelling, interest in watching, and animation. One of the questions was whether my animation seemed professional when compared to the professional animation. Surprisingly 50% had answered yes. One of my peers told me to consider the amount of time I had for mine compared to the professional work made by an entire studio; mentioning that if I could do this project in a relaxed setting the results would be very different. However the other half of the results had thought otherwise; this told me that even though I had less time to create my final product it still wasn’t a professional display of animation.

  • This made me think of the things that could be improved within more time working on the project, and more studying on cleaner, smoother and anatomically correct animation and movement.

  • This leads into the last bit of feedback I had collected. After giving the link to my final animation for my peers to watch, I asked what was one thing they liked about my animation and what they would improve.

  • Two of the comments mentioned how they liked the support element shown between the main characters family, friends and role models she looks up to; “how the support from others were portrayed as different characters”. Another actually complimented me on the creative angles I had used, “For example the intro with the character running was animated well and looked really cool.” This then again solidified the faith I had in my creativity and storytelling; seeing that this was one of the strongest points about my final product shows me where my skills are strongest and what other than that needs improvement.

  • In the comments of my “What improvements should be made?” I had a lot of critique on the speed and overall appearance of my animation. “The introductions to the characters should be cut out and the animation should be shorter.” and also the animation at some points was bothering, such as the walking scene: “animate the movement of the ground when the feet are walking to make it not look like their feet are sliding.” These tips have taught me to make more time for editing the pacing and making sure there was no mistakes in the animation.

Improvements

  • After taking in all the feedback I decided to go back and see what I could quickly edit, showing that I am indeed listening to the criticisms that I’ve been given. Here I tried to fix the walking scene by making the background move using the tiling effect After Effects has. I also attempted to shorten the character slideshow. I didn’t necessarily want to cut the entire part out because of how long it took me to create that scene, animating it in after effects, however I do recognise that its on screen for way too long.

Meeting the brief

  • After asking my peer for an assessment, I next had to assess my own work; acknowledging what I thought of my final result, the work I had done that leaded to the production and how I did overall when it came to following the brief.

  • The brief I had chosen was to create something for the Adidas campaign that sought out to “gets girls engaged with sport - focuses on removing the mental or physical barriers that prevent girls from getting onto, or staying on, the fields, courts and pitches.” For this brief I had originally decided to create a 30 second animation based on helping girls get over barriers that may occur when playing sports. To get the specific theme my project would focus, on I went and researched the reasons as to why girls were dropping out of sports and started from there. I wanted to focus on a younger audience as this seemed to be the core of the problem. After thorough research I came across a strong point for me to base my animation on: The idea of periods being barriers for young girls when it comes to sport, and that with the right support from people you trust, those barriers can be removed. I created an animation based on this point from what I had researched and I feel as though I had done a great job showing this in my project. Through my feedback and my hard work I can say that I correctly followed what the brief wanted of me.

  • Because I wanted to focus on the source of the reason why girls were becoming less engaged in sport, my targeted audience for this project was young girls ages 12-17. In my research I had seen that between those ages, about 64% of girls had quit doing sports. I thought of stopping so many girls from quitting sports because of barriers that can be removed, and so I chose ages 12-17 to encourages girls at a young age so they don’t think of dropping out. During the planning stage I had taken a survey asking people who fit within my targeted audience various question like  would’ve encouraged them to continue playing sports. And after taking in all that information and creating my animation, I made another survey to see if I met the expectations of my targeted audience. Looking at my feedback after the fact, I can see that I did well in creating an animation that met to my target audience.  I asked if they though my animation could encourage teenagers and preteens, and the results were quite positive.

  • Asking for feedback like I did, earlier on in the process of this project, really helped with the production. For example, when I was designing my main character I had created various silhouetted designs and sketches to choose from. To help me arrive at a definite decision for a character that was interesting to look at, I asked my peers what designed had the most strong headed and teenage-like personality.

  • Results like these helped me build my animation to what it is now. I used this same method for my style sheets, in order for me to get definite choice of what style to go for.

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  • I had done everything the brief had required of me. Looking back at all the work I had done, I could see that I didn’t leave a single thing out. Especially in my Project Proposal I can see that I wrote what I had planned at the time, although many of the things I had said I would do has changed (for example when I said my animation would be around 30 seconds and now it has ended up being 1 min 30 seconds long). Project Proposal is complete with my Rationale on what I had researched, the concept I wanted to do at the time,  an evaluation of all my work up until that point, a timetable, and full research bibliography.

Professionalism

  • In the makings of this project, I didn’t focus so much on making my animation look professional as I did focus on getting my animation completed and interesting to watch. In the process of animating I did try to make sure the frames where timed properly: figuring out if something should be animated in ones or two, or how long a frame should be held for. To cut down on the amount of frames that would needed to be exported from Opentoonz as a png, I would decide how long a frame should be held for in After Effects and reuse that image for longer than planned in Opentoonz. So while editing in After Effects, although I was stressed from the countdown to the deadline, I attempted to professionally edit my work to the best of my ability.

  • While working in After Effects, I tried to add small edits and feature to polish my animation and make the movement/action look better. For example, when ever the main character would kick of punch the wall I would add a wiggle effect (which I had learned to do by watching a tutorial on using expressions in After Effects) that made the screen look as though it was shaking. This gave the kick and punch the illusion of a powerful action, there for making those scenes more interesting.

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  • The editing may looks as though it was simple, as all I really had to do was import my exported files into After Effects, and layer them as to show the motion throughout each singular frame. However it was a lot more complicated than that, as I had to make sure the pacing of the animation was okay, and I had to add my own transitions. In the end the editing process wasn’t nearly as difficult as it was figuring out how I would animate the scenes, but it was difficult working around the problems I had in After Effects with the playback speed and transitions not working out as they should.

  • In the end I didn’t end up with an animation that looked professionally made, but it did look professionally planned out.

Problem Solving

  • As the deadline was creeping up on me, I had to rush a lot of my animation in order to export the individual frames and get them into Adobe After Effects in time. Unfortunately, in all the chaos I made a few mistakes while animating that only came to my attention while deep in the editing process. One of these recurring issues was the transparency in a few of my frames. To the right you can see how the frame isn’t coloured in white. This wasn’t such a huge issue however: to fix the mistake in the first image I simply deleted the frame and made sure the animation still looked fine without it. And for the second image, I imported of my premade backgrounds and used that instead. You can still sort of see where the horizon line was meant to be for the background, but I think I did well in covering up this mistake.

  • Unfortunately there were some issues that I couldn’t fix before the deadline, such as the issue with the pacing of the video I had discussed about in my Primary Feedback section. While editing on After Effects, my software had a problem where the playback feed was extremely fast; faster than it actually was whenever I tried exporting what I had edited. This in turn ruined the pacing I had in mind and made editing a lot harder. Everytime I wasn’t sure about the speed of a certain scene, I had to export my work in Media Encoder and play it back as an mp4. This wasted a lot of time and with the deadline closing in, I had no choice but to stick with what I had.

  • Even though I had quite a few mistakes in my animation, surprisingly my overall designs and ideas hadn’t changed. I did tweak the scene with the wall punching my main character, but the was out of convenience and to get a better angle from that specific scene. Having my animation stay how I planned it assured me that I had a solid plan.

Successes

  • In the end I had created an animation that I was pleased with. It wasn’t something that I was completely proud of (knowing that with time I could definitely do better) but I was happy that I managed to finish it in the end. This project wasn’t so challenging to plan for as it was to actually create and so i’m happy everything turned out as it was planned. Although there are somethings I definitely think need improvement, I can say there are parts of the animation that I liked how it turned out.

  • For example the amount of angle switches I had were certainly creative and helped make my animation a lot more interesting to look at. Some of the angles I used even needed the background to be animated; the fact that I was ambitious enough to try animating backgrounds in some of my scenes is admirable to myself. This shows that in the future I won’t be afraid to try out innovative ideas and framing.

  • Another thing I liked about my project was my story. I feel as though I had planned about a very solid story for this animation; something not that crazy that it couldn’t be understood, but not so boring that everything was obvious. From the results of my feedback, I can definitely say that the story was my strongest factor in my final product; especially my use of metaphors with the wall and the supporting characters.

  • One more thing that I liked about my project was the characters I used. I had done a lot of extra research on my final character choices and made plenty designs for my main character. I really like how I thought of representing real life female athletes with the mindset of giving young girls actual people to look up to. Doing said extra research just for the characters shows how I took this project seriously and worked on fulfilling the task issued in the brief. I made sure to choose athletes that had some sort of relation to the animation and to my main character; as the animation features the main character running a lot and jumping over walls, I thought to choose heptathlon athletes.

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  • Although this work doesn’t display the best of my animation skills, I will definitely be putting it into my portfolio because it showcases my strong eye for storytelling and use of creative symbolism when creating an animation. In future, if I ever needed to improve my final product I would definitely start by going back and fixing the animation. The skill I need to improve the most would be my animating skill, and also my anatomy skills.

Progress & Learning

  • During my planning I had thought of a lot of ideas I wanted to use in my final product, but for this to be possible I sought out to learn how to use the programs I needed to create my animation with; Adobe After Effects and Opentoonz. I went ahead and searched for various helpful tutorials that would help me with the process of animating and editing. Through trying to better my skills for this project I learnt things that will help me in future projects; such as how to navigate After Effects. After finding so many helpful youtube tutorials on the software, like the hour long video I found by the channel Olufemii, I can now use the basic features of After Effects without being confused. I also did a lot of extensive research on anatomy for artists. I was determined to better my art and animation, so I’ve been studying anatomy and how to animate with the use of helpful books such as Anatomy For Artists, and The Animator's Survival Kit. This not only improved the accuracy of my drawings of the human body and drawing different dynamic poses, but it helped me with more accurate movement in animations. I can say that my animation skills have certainly improved since my last animation project, where I can confidently try out animating different dynamic movements.

  • With this animation project, compared to my last animation project, I haven’t really improved my time management skills very much. I still underestimate the amount of work I need to do and how long it should actually take me. Because of how I had to rush this project, I have learnt from my mistake to keep animations shorter compared to the amount of time I have to complete production. Next time I will aim to improve my time managing and give myself less work to do. If I had the chance to do this project over, I would probably make my animation a lot shorter. This way it would give me more time to make more stylistic choices for the art, it will allow me to actually colour my animation, and I will be able to focus on animation with better quality.

Self Grading

  • Overall I think I did an amazing job on this project:

  • For my Project Proposal I would give myself a high merit or low distinction. I feel as though I had the quantity and quality of writing in check, but the design aspects of my Project Proposal fell short. It wasn’t as interesting as I could have made it look and although what I had written was quite good, I felt as though I was being a little lazy when it came to the design compared to some of my peers Project Proposal.

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  • When it comes to my research and planning I would definitely give myself a Distinction. When researching the different topics I could choose with the Adidas brief, I made sure I was thorough. I had found a topic I felt wasn’t necessarily talked about a lot amongst the female athlete field, and especially amongst younger girls, and so I made it my point of focus. Then when it came to my planning I had split it into 2 sections to properly organise my ideas. On one hand I had my initial thinking ideas that had me still brainstorming the story and the character I wanted to display, while then solidified my final story and character ideas and got to physically drawing all my ideas down. This process was especially long for me as I wanted a detailed planning that would allow me to take it relatively easy in the production stage. 

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  • For my final product I would give myself a low distinction. For the amount of time given to me to complete my production log and submit my final product, I created a pretty good animation with a good story and message that relates to my chosen focus for this brief. My final product didn’t waver from my planning; it had a lot of effort, time and energy put into it, and it managed to appeal to my target audience. Not only does this all show my dedication to the project, but it shows how hard I worked on it and how detailed I tried to be when it came to applying my great research and planning.

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  • And finally for my Evaluation I would award myself a distinction. Throughout all these paragraphs I made sure to cover all of my mistakes and successes in all of the stages of my FMP. I referred back to my previous work, showing images as examples and linking them to to topic at hand. I was definitely honest with all my self assessing; I took note of what I needed to improve and what I actually liked about certain areas of my work. Covering all my bases and questions that needed answered, I can confidently say that I would mark myself a distinction for this evaluation.

FIN.

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