Friday 17th January 2014

Improvments

After I had screened my animation I decided to improve my animation reflecting on the feedback I had received. So this past few days I have been making amendments to my animation and adding more content to hopefully get it up to a passable animation.

The first improvement I made to my animation was adding colour. Colour is pretty essential for my animation as weather doesn't really occur (e.g. rain and snow) so without the colour scheme there isn't anything to help determine which season is which. I didn't add too much colour as I was unsure about what the houses and street colours should be, but I did change the grass, trees and sky, as well as some other minor things.

A before and after screenshot of the first frame of my animation. It's now a lot clearer what season the animation starts in and also looks a lot more vibrant.

Once I had recoloured everything that I felt needed recolouring, I then began to continue animating my scene. Again reflecting on the feedback I received this next scene I added a bus to act as a wipe to transition the animation into summer. I think this transition works really well and the season also is that representable of summer. I added shadows to the houses, bus stop and tree to give the effect that there is strong sunlight. Also the sky is cloudless so now the scene looks like a hot summers day.

The bus stop also received a slight improvement in the form of a poster that is now on the bus stop window. It's not that great of a poster as it's only a white sheet of paper with text on it but it's only there to tell people what season it is.

After the season changes I decided to have add a little animation in for my cat. I didn't have the time to make many changes to my cat so I kept it single and whilst it's sitting at the bus stop it scratches its head with its paw. I used a picture I drew before I was animating to use as a reference for this bit of the animation and it helped a lot. It didn't take too long to get the animation made as it was only a few frames and I reused some frames to save time.

Lastly, I made my animation turn into the autumn season. Originally I was planning to have a gust of blow through the street carrying autumn leaves to litter the ground, and that would act as the transition. But I was unable to get this too work to how I would like, so instead I decided to use the sky as a transition. I turned the sky from a clear blue to a grey with clouds entering from both sides. As the sky was changing I made the shadows fade away and the ground slowly became littered with leaves. Changing the sign this way was slightly awkward so I motion tweened a leaf across the screen and flying past the poster. As the leaf overlaps the poster, the text changes but it's not very noticable. I do think I could have done better with the motion tween but as I am limited with time, I decided to leave it as it is.