The Classical Elements: Evaluation

‘The Classical Elements’ brief for me was very challenging, mainly because it is the first animated project that I have done start to finish. This includes the whole aspect of research, concept art, brainstorming, to then actual running tests, animating everything and then editing and putting everything together. I didn’t realise just how much thought and hard work you have to put into an animation to get it the way you want it to.

I came across many errors and problems when creating my 20 second piece, some were creative errors and other were technical. I love focussing on the overall look of my work and I found choosing colour palettes for a whole setting was very enjoyable but then when it came to adding my element, fire, I found the initial colours I wanted blended in too much with the fire and therefore you couldn’t distinguish what was happening, which was a major issue seen as though this was my actual plot. I then had to change the setting of my background in order for the fire to be apparent and in the end I was happy with the colour scheme.

I also ran into a massive problem when trying to convert my animation into a .mov file. Though in the end it was a simple process, it took many tries from downloading video conversion apps to experimenting with Quicktime, I just simply used image sequences instead to import into Adobe Premiere. I’m not the most confident when it comes to the technical aspect of editing, but after sticking by it and finding a resolution myself, I feel like I have much more confidence when it comes to understanding file formats and how to import footage. 

Something I found tedious but I did actually enjoy was adding sound. What was tedious for me was sitting through numerous songs to try and find the right one that would fit the atmosphere of my animation. I found it difficult to even find certain sounds that I wanted in my animation because of copyright, but in the end it was fun looking for them and adding them into Premiere. I thought this was the easiest bit to work with out of the whole project because I have used Premiere before, and therefore felt less pressure to get it done.

What was most useful for me however, was all the feedback I received. From the first interim crit that we had, the final crit, and to just in general asking for advice from my teacher and peers. Sometimes when you look at something for so long you miss certain errors and flaws or those flaws you become too concentrated on, so I found constant feedback was mandatory for me and helped me get my animation done.

Overall I feel really proud of what I achieved. I feel like I did everything myself and came up with my longest piece of animation so far and added sound to it. It took me a long time to do and it was hard but I also really enjoyed it and I am proud of all the solutions I came up with to all the errors I encountered myself.