In my story the worms and snail role was to add wonder, tension and curiosity to my protagonist. A failing I did at the beginning of animating
was to spend a lot of time animating them. I ended up spending one day animating about 5 snail/worms without colour, because I felt I had
to show their movements.
The snails and worms were there to create atmosphere and did not need to be elaborate.. I was able to think of different ways to shorten
my production time of them such as duplicating them at times, adding shadow by duplicating the fill colour and creating the lanterns and shell
coloured in one go and moving it a long frame by frame to quicken colouring time. This changed my colouring time from 1 hour per snail to 10
minutes. They added time that could have been spent on my main characters. do not regret putting them into my story as it taught me to think
of short cuts, to work without worry of perfection and to create atmosphere through my animation.
One of the lessons I learnt was to utilise the power of the keyframes, exploring this in my sketchbook instead of going with my first initial idea
allowed me to think more creatively and make the animation more interesting. I have learnt about the drive of the character and how we can
present this. I wanted to challenge myself in doing a child animation. Hazel, the character in my story is an 8 year old. I spent my
time researching and grasping her character, I did this by using footage of myself and drawing on my own photos as a child. By doing this I
was able to understand the freedom and energy of the child. This research assisted in allowing me to hit my objective as I took the time to
analyse and create effective character animation. I looked and analysed characters of this age, viewable at my Research Tab on my blog.
Character gestures and research
Home video of myself
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