At the start of this project I was asked to find a 10-15 second long audio clip that could not be deemed offensive in any manner. I spent a while looking for different clips however they were all too long for the project brief, until I landed on a clip from the comedy show ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ as it had a funny line delivery and could be quite effective and expressive for this project. The original clip is 18 seconds however I cut it down to 10 by taking off parts that it did not need. My goal was to make a smooth and polished animation with a child like nature to it as in the previous project I had a more detailed art style which took too long, with this in mind I continued into designing characters.

I believe my strengths in animation are making very simplistic but appealing to the eye characters and I believe that is what I accomplished with this. We were asked to make a 360 of all sides of the character. As I usually do in projects that involve characters I made a 360 animation as I believe this genuinely helps later on in the animation process. We were asked to make two character designs however I had the idea of making my characters a pair of ants but change the colours to differentiate the two.

For me, backgrounds where always a massive struggle as I specialise in character animation, which are usually simpler because they are always moving around. I have always appreciated backgrounds and the time they must take but I never knew how to make them myself. I am very glad that Jess taught me how to structurally design a background to make the lighting make sense. I still think I have a long way to go until I become good but the backgrounds used in this project make a lot more sense then in any other project I have done. I used a mix of pastel and bright colours to capture the childlike aesthetic, I also used minimal outlines so that the characters would stand out.

The bulk (the main animation) of this project had to be done on Toon Boom as it is one of the leading animation programs in the industry. Previously I had been using ProCreate and just recently ProCreate Dreams in my last project to animate, I found these programs sufficient enough but I would always get frustrated by the interface and or lack of features as they are both iPad applications. Toon Boom is not without any fault however it is very intuitive and easy to pick up especially after using programs like Photoshop. I found it very easy to get into a good workflow using this as it has many quality of life features like a colouring layer and keyframes. 

I redid the X-Sheets after doing the main body of animation as it would make the process easier, also the audio clips I used for each X-Sheet where slightly out of time with the words so I had to start from scratch, after that things where perfect.