Final Animation

In my animation, I started off by using panels from my animatic to help the scenes in my story.

To help the narrative, I also added an extra character 'parent' to the story. I gave this character the yellow car.

This character would race against the red Mini that the 'boy' would be playing with. This would create the imagery of opposition in the race.

One of the troubles I had throughout was keeping a consistent art style and over rendering.

I spent too much time colouring the assets in a semi realistic form where I should've instead focused more on perspective instead. This lead to some of my backgrounds being too flat.

I also could've used masks to show lighting instead of colour picking the individual tones to save time.

Drawing one panel took too long and ultimately lead to burn out which affected my time management for this project which caused some of the quality during the end to drop.

I also think I would've recoloured the car in the above image yellow, to show that it existed in the first scene instead of it appearing suddenly in the race scene to show more coherency in the story.

As seen on the left, the tree's background wasn't fully removed -leading to this white outline which lowered the quality of the scene. In retrospective, I should've changed the threshold on Photoshop then created a mask with a green gradient on top. I will implement this when I come back to work on it again later.

During the end, I thought that the Mini brand wasn't represented enough so I put up a Mini logo for a few seconds with the text 'Mini Moments 2024'.

However in doing so, I sacrificed the last scene which was supposed to show the mother and son playing together and so my final animation lacked coherency in its story.

Lastly, I added sound to my animation with Premier Pro. This step was the easiest to implement as I just found copyright free sounds on Youtube and other sites, changed the file type to MP3, then put it under my video to export.

I experimented with a range of different car sound effects as well as 'cart' sounds for the wooden toy cars in the other scenes. My background music was a guitar indie pop music, to match the overall theme of family as well as the car race scenes for nostalgia.

In conclusion, I am semi-content with my final project. While I was able to experiment and work under a tight deadline for a commissioned project, I also felt like I could've improved in a lot of places like in art style, animation, storyline and time keeping.

However, I also learnt a lot from this project like how to add appropriate sounds and animating using Adobe After Effects. To improve, I would like to redraw some of the background scenes and replace the end scene with the original 'mother and son' scene to make the story flow better.