Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on the final unit of the Digital Art & Animation course, which incorporated creating a completed product tailored for the target audience's and client's need. Just like previous units, it involved contextual study, researching, pre-production, production, evaluation and presentation. This time, however, I was free to choose any brief I was interested in, as long as it was related to my field of study.

​

My brief of choice was Disney's Narrative-Driven Comedy Cartoon, which focused on creating a lead character that would hold audience's attention. I decided to choose this project due to my sheer interest in character animation as well as creating comedy cartoons. Up to this point I created countless comedy stories, be it as written text or comic stips, and thought that comedy cartoons would be great step forward.

​

This project's audience were young children and teenagers with families, and friends, who may invest emotionally in fictional characters and their stories, and may use them to learn about the real world. Even though this audience was unlike any I had during this course, it more or less covered the same audience I target my comics to, meaning I already somewhat understood them.

​

Another critical aspect of this project was my client was very interested in seeing good animation - it was essential for me to design an interesting storyboard, poses and movement. In the brief my client has clearly stated that they are not interested in the visual attributes of my animation, including both characters and environments. Nevertheless, it is something I had to consider since it would make my animation more appealing for my audience.

​

Also, I had to continously reflect on my work throughout the project. I found it rather challenging as I am not kind of person that talks a lot about my work. I had to change my usual approach of just sitting down and working as long as I can and start taking breaks to document my progress and reflect on my work. 

​

At the beginning of this project, I had no clear image of what I want to product in mind. Fortunately, my ideas were greatly influenced by a number of factors:

• During my initial research on traditional animation  I have encountered guides of two brilliant traditional animator that taught me principles of animation as well as how to successfully design a character and how properly show movement in animation. This reasearch did not affect my idea, however, it showed me how my client tackled their animation and allowed me to work more effectively at the production stage; thanks to the newly gained understanding of timing and spacing I was able to create better looking movement.

• Later, I researched similar successful products to see what made them suitable for their audiences and to look for inspiration. It is thanks to that piece of research and the idea-generating exercise at the college, that I started thinking of stories about rabbits.

• My character designs come from researching rabbit movement - I watched videos of real and animated rabbits, which directly inspired how my characters looked like and moved like. White rabbit with black bottom became a white rabbit with black trousers. Rabbit that moved like a spring became a rabbit-spring.

• My animation was also influenced by my week-long work placement at Flow, where I was responsible of animating characters via series of motion tweens. I used the technique of separating a character into body parts and turning them into puppets in my final product in some of early scenes.

My research covered only a handful of sources, however, they did cover a really vast number of topics, ranging from theoretical concepts to practical tips. The only thing I would change, if I was given enough time, would be adding some more primary sources to widen my perspective. Nevertheless, I think that my research was thorough enough and sustained throughout the project and was successful since it allowed me to go  through the pre-production stage smoothly.

​

During that stage I  used my research to come up with a range of different ideas, which I have then evaluated against the brief, and chose the most fitting one. This way I came up with a story of rabbits taking a long journey do buy a single carrot. Story is very simple but has a lot of meaning behind it:

• I chose rabbits as my characters instead of people or other animal for the sake of my audience as they are very friendly looking and are not associated with any bad traits, making them very likeable from the start and easier to invest into.

• Rabbits are commonly known for liking carrots, making it understandable why they would want to get in my story.

• There is a relatively long build up in the story - it takes a lot of time for my rabbits to leave the house simply because they have to do their Monday-things. It is supposed to make the audience believe that going shopping will be just as normal, which I inverted for the comedic effect by making them go through some very extreme places.

• Journey is very long but takes a little of screen time to show the ridiculousness of the situation without boring the audience. It also shows that it is normal for those rabbit, inverting audience's expectations once more for the comedic effect.

To make it possible, I produced a range of documents like storyboards, charts, moodboards and tests. At some point I even tried to use a Gannt Chart for time-keeping but stopped when it tried to charge me for that.

Looking back, I think that I was a little too ambitious, considering the deadline. It is because I planned to animate in 24 frames per second from start to finish as a single sequence without any loops and cycles. However, I noticed it would be unrealistic and decided to adapt my approach to my situation. This is why I dropped my framerate to 20 and used loops and cycles to save time during the production stage.

​

The most exciting part of this project was obviously the production stage. After having everything planned out I have created a folder structure on my pendrive and came up with a work pipeline that consisted of creating all assets first and then working on scenes in order. It was another thing I learnt during my work placement, which allowed me to avoid the usual mess I make with my files.

​

The production itself was pretty smooth - everything went as planned, except for the fact I had to shift it one week forward because of work placement. Fortunately, it did not affect my production at all as I was able to complete my animation without any major issues. However, there were some minor problems that I managed to overcome with the biggest one being file conversion. Up to this point, to make animations I used to create .png files that I converted to .gif and then .mp4. This method was very inefficient, as it reduced my animation's quality with each conversion, and unnecessarily complicated. Just before starting production I came up with a different method that incorporated next to no quality loss. 

​

As I said, the production was straightforward thanks to my research, planning and preparation. However, I think that the main reason behind that were my animating skills I have gained over the past two years while working on other units and my experience with software I used. Not only I was already accused with all tools available, but I also knew how to use them effectively to achieve desired outcomes. For example; I knew how to use motion tweens to mimic natural motion and I knew how to modify it with other effects and manipulating keyframes to make it more interesting. Also, I reduced my workload by simplifying lightning (in the indoors scenes light always comes from the window, which is either on the left or right side), using small palette of colours (rabbits are black and white, outdoors are green, sky is blue and white, mountains are orange) and using simplified designs (characters' limbs are just lines). These are another things I learned while working on previous units.

​

After finishing all the production, I started looking for different ways to present my work to my target audience. I have considered some realistic methods, such as streaming sites, social media and my website as well as some unrealistic ones like billboard and merchandise. I think that it was very important to think about all methods imaginable, even if I cannot access them. The reason behind that, is the fact that I would not present it anyway if it was a real project - in that case I would work with other people, including the marketing team with client's budget who would consider and try to make those unrealistic methods work.

​

Overall, I think that this project was a major success for a couple of reasons:

• I managed to successfully  meet the brief's technical requirements; finished animating is within the time limit, all processes of character designing and storyboards are available at this very website.

• I managed to successfully meet the brief's creative requirements; I did not use any retrospective designs, the style of animation was defined by the character and not the industry norms (it is very tricky to prove, but you can see that the animation was designed around the characters like Long Rabbit that move in a way that is by no means normal).

• I managed to successfully meet my audience's needs; my animation is suitable for children and teenagers because of its light story filled with comedy and likeable characters that are easy to understand and invest into. One of the brief's goals was to teach my audience values, which I think I have achieved pretty well - my story shows that it is important to have a clear goal in mind, enjoy your way to it and good things will happen anyway. Surprisingly, my animation also promotes healthy lifestyles (healthy food, interacting with friends, enjoying nature, walking for entertainment, exercising etc.). Personally, I think that it is the most successful part of the project and one I like the most - it showed I was capable of adding more layers to my product than just making it move.

• I improved my animating skills as I learnt how to use principles of animation, timing and spacing, and actually used them during the production stage.

• It allowed me create some really good animation I can put in my portfolio, which is something I am always trying to do.

• I showed my product to the target audience and they were really happy with it. 

To achieve all of that I had to make some decisions that ultimately altered the final product quite heavily. As I said before, I had to reduce the initial frame rate and reduce the total number of frames by using loops and cycles. Because of that, my animation is not as smooth as I wished and does not include everything from the storyboard. However, it is because of those compromises I made I was able to finish my production on time and the animation did not suffer that much, anyway.

Over the last few weeks I have been constantly asking people for feedback, which included other students, tutors, animators and even the target audience. Though, their feedback did not affect my production (it was mostly praise, which showed me I was on the right track).

​

Finally, I would like to things I would like to achieve if I was given more time. I would definitely try to increase the frame rate and make one long sequence as I believe it would tell the story better and be more appealing, and technically impressive. I think that a piece like that would be a great addition to my portfolio. Another thing I would improve would be my backgrounds, which even though look nice, are static. I would really like to animate them as well, maybe make them more detailed, just to make them look nicer. However, that could take months.

​

Having said all that, I am really happy with this project, my product and where it took me.