Final Outcome，processes and reflection

This five week has taught me different processes for animating than I have ever done before. At the beginning I did a mind map and searched keywords on art websites, but I actually started animating in harmony a little late because I didn’t have a very clear direction.I couldn’t be the kind of student who was clear about their goals right from the start, I either hesitated for a long time in choosing the style of animation and the direction of the character’s story, or I made decisions too quickly leading to unconsidered questions popping up when I making the animation. This made me a little nervous about learning harmony, and worried about how many problems I would have in deciding non-human character. I decided to use a clay snake that was freshly created by a child as my character. This clay snake had just been made up and very curious about the world. One way of exploring this world is to imitate what happening around it, to experience things that it doesn’t have. But the world is too varied for this little snake ，it gradually turns back into a puddle of clay.I did get stuck a lot during the process because of my lack in drawing skills,I find that the character’s mouth is much more lively in a sideways position than in frontal position, so I have a lot of sideways talking in my animation. Also, I think the character speaks with a little bit of unconscious smugness, so I make the character tilt his head slightly. To enrich the body language a bit, I made the tail of the snake look like a finger, the finger would move with the shaking of the body.Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) At first I tried to use After effect to create an entire animation, but soon realised that this behaviour was meaningless and did not enable me to make objective decision about my pathway for the next year based on what I had learned. Sometimes the hardest thing is not the actual problems I face, it is the arrogance of thinking that I have the knowledge to solve a pending course. The final animation is not a delicate, but I did follow the steps of living voice, carefully simulating my own Pronunciation, studying the background features that serve to highlight the main character, and using after effect to do a bit editing. In the process of using this software, some problems with the installation prevented me to check the transparency of the previous frame and I had to imagine or switch frames frequently to draw the next one, which stopped my progress for a week. I chose the fourth of the five audio, a kid talking about why he doesn’t want to be a billionaire. I thought it was interesting and could relate to a previous project I had done about a housewife who gave everything she had but no one noticed her. So I started working on the character design, but some research in the first two weeks made me realise that the animation didn’t quite relate effectively to the previous project. This left me a little disappointed and feeling like I wasted my time. But in the second two weeks, after I slowly learnt how to use harmony, it did give me the passion to learn about unfamiliar software when I successfully used keyframes to create continuous animation. At the end stage, I could not export transparent PNG4 sequences and the tutorials could not answer my questions, so I tried many other methods and asked many people before finally solving the problem. In the middle of numerous such difficulties, I gradually understood the benefits of communication and became worried about the more difficult learning ahead, but more than that, I was helped by what I learnt during the year.