D&AD Evaluation

I think this has been one of my most successful projects. I set out with an idea to achieve this traditional Chinese style looking animation, which told a story that related to the 'Journey to the west' tale. It took my a while to get a concept of what I wanted to happen in the story, I couldn't stick literal to the song as the lyrics weren't strong enough to make a narrative, so I decided to use the scene the song is set in (a volcano) but incorporate my own narrative, something that will be interesting to the viewer to watch. My only problem with this is that the story will appeal more to fans of the tale, where as viewers that are unfamiliar with the tale are less likely to understand the story.
The main problem I had was character animation. I have never attempted such in depth animation and I think I diving in at the deep end with this project, problems with this meant loosing some of the characters from my story, as the time it to took to animate 10 seconds of movement with one character was a long process and I simply did not have the time to repeat the process. However I still think that the majority of the animating is successful and looks very effective.
I am very please with the final outcome. To make the animation have a nice look I animated the whole video in Adobe After Effects the took the clip into Final Cut Pro where I made the editing tighter and added a strong looking vignetting look, and added a rough border, all these affects gave the video a dark look to it which I think makes the animation look a lot better.
The only changes I would make, would be to have a few more close up shots of my main characters, so then I could show more emotions of the characters, but apart from that I think my video is a success, and I thought I stuck well to my original idea.

Traditional Chinese Animation

This video is a very smart 3D animation using traditional Chinese drawings. I think it has an amazing style and i really like how slow the animation is, it works really well with the slow music. The music is similar to the song i have to animate to so it's a good example to look at how i am going to edit my film. Although to achieve an animation like this is a bit ambitious i think this is a very clever animation relating to the sort of style i want to use.

Ghost Patrol

Ghost patrol is one of my favorite artists, he is from Australia, and has a unique style, influenced by graffiti and fine art. His drawings of characters inspired me the most, his illustrations have a simple look, with calming colours, they appear to be very fragile yet the situations the characters are in gives them strength, this creates a nice blend of simple drawings but with emotion. This is something i am taking on board, as my character designs i want them to appear simply drawn to fit in with the Chinese traditional style, but want to reveal their inner strength as they are trapped in a volcano. How Ghost patrol achieves this is by the characters facial expressions and their postures, this adds up a lot in animations so it is something i wish to master.