11 Seconds - 2D

Research
My time researching was categorised into two different areas: tools and principles. By researching into tools I was trying to determine what programs or types of animation would work best for me, considering things like the learning curve, ease of use, features or range of what is possible as well as the quality that could be produced. Here are some of the options I found available to me:

• Stop motion
• Paper
• Clay
• Leg/Toys/Objects
• Hand Drawn (Traditional)
• Adobe Photoshop 
• Adobe Flash

Due to personal preference, I eschewed the thought of doing stopmotion- while simple and easy to learn, timings things to a soundtrack with it is actually quite difficult to do and since I knew I wouldn't have much time (just 3 weeks from beginning to research to final animation) I didn't want to risk getting stuck trying to line everything up only to run out of time. Furthermore, due to the lack of computer generated interpolation, I would be limited to a maximum number of frames by the amount of time I had available. As such, the animation would never be as smooth as I could get it by using computer software to aid me.

Despite the thought of an entirely hand drawn animation being impressive, I also recognised it would be time consuming with many of the same issues as stop motion and so I began looking into two-dimensional animation packages on the computer.

There were two major options, both from Adobe. One was the ever popular Photoshop, designed primarily for photo editing and manipulation with basic animation as one of its features, and the other was Flash, built for, among other things, animation from the get go.

Tutorials for animation in Photoshop were few and far between and searching for them meant sifting through tutorials about the main focus of the program. Despite being mostly intuitive, the interface was frustrating because a few things weren't intuitive. Moreover, I struggled to find a way to easily control the frames of the animation and there was no way I found that allowed me to import the sound file, meaning synchronisation of the audio and visual components would be difficult and the final result would have to be manipulated in a different, external program after the fact, an idea I did not relish.

Flash, being something I had dabbled in slightly a few years back, was much easier to pick up and go. I'm sure there were many inefficiencies and silly decision I did make in Flash that could have been remedied with the proper application of some of the automation tools that Flash provides but I found simple, frame by frame animation worked fine for my needs and Flash allowed me to do that intuitively. The onion skinning feature was invaluable and towards the end of the animation I wanted to experimented with motion tweening, in an attempt to emulate the smoothness of camera movement and Flash was much easier in that regard. With time running short I chose Flash.

After my research into what kind of animation I wanted to produce I then wanted to look into how to actually make animation that looked good. My first search actually came upon an invaluable resource which I had heard of time and time again in the past: Disney Animation - The Illusion of Life by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas. It sets out twelve basic principles of animation that animators use to create interesting and good looking animation that is believable:

-Squash and Stretch
-Anticipation
-Staging
-Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
-Follow Through and Overlapping Action
-Slow In and Slow Out
-Arcs
-Secondary Action
-Timing
-Exaggeration
-Solid Drawing
-Appeal

This information proved critical in order to achieve to quality of animation that I did reach; without it my animations would have been much more basic and amateurish.

Brainstorm

Storyboards
Link to storyboard here.

Creative Process
Creation was done entirely in Flash, using "Pose to Pose" animation rather than Straight Ahead Action

Evaluation