Nicholas Sanchez

 

The process of creating this short animation was a large endeavor requiring much time and effort. I think that, although we had realistically expected that such a process would take this long, even we were surprised by how much effort was required to complete the task we set out to do. Still, in the end, we created a fun, short animation that satisfied our goal.

 

Perhaps the biggest lesson that I had learned from this process was how large the gap between concept and creation is, as what he had thought was a modest story turned out to be very ambitious. I think this occurs because when we had visualized scenes, we had pictured them occurring in real time. However, the process of physically manipulating our character and shooting actions at a rate of 2 frames each truly (understatement) elongated the process. Therefore everything from shooting to editing took about a week to do altogether, making this project a huge undertaking.

 

The model magic clay we used to animate our ball was, without a doubt, a saving grace. The nature of this clay is such that it wont dry out fully unless left alone, and therefore can retain malleability well after it has been sculpted. At the same time, it offers a better rigidity than modeling clay, therefore allowing our animated ball to hold its form and even walk. In future animations I would certainly use this as an asset to ease the animation process.

 

An issue we had when shooting was a large lighting inconsistency. Unfortunately, due to our location and the motion of the sun, our lighting varied in the initial shots of the animation. Fortunately, my partner Dave is incredibly talented at color correction, and was able to fix this in post. Along that same line, many of the critiques we had received after the viewing of our rough cut were much more readily fixable in post production. Therefore, I would conclude that post production is incredibly important and a useful tool in fixing any mistakes or problems that were made during filming.