With all the feedback from the second interim, I was ready to begin working on my animation. However, I also had to do the clean-up work for the RCA student as part of Informed Practices: I spent most of my Easter break focusing on that, since learning to use Adobe Animate and matching the student’s style was much more time-consuming than I anticipated. I eventually finished it and made something I was proud of, but it admittedly set me back with my own project, which might not have been very wise of me in terms of time management.
Once I did begin working on my own animation, I started with the backgrounds: keeping them lineless was a challenge, as it’s a technique I hadn’t practiced much beforehand, but the end result looked fairly clean and organised (which was also helped by the limited colour palettes). The hardest shots were the campfire scene (due to the angle and complex lighting) and the classroom (due to the alien aesthetic of the furniture and the various student designs), but in the end, I’d say all the backgrounds work for what they were trying to do.
For the green scenes, I added some canvases and paintings to the background, to show that the human is a prolific artist, addressing the feedback regarding that. The art gallery was another one I edited significantly: instead of including random images, I created silhouetted versions of images found within the Golden Record. People who aren’t aware of the Record will simply see these as random images, whereas people who know of it will recognize and appreciate it, so it works either way, and I’m happy with the result. Using real images from the Record in the classroom (with an added scan effect to make them look older and more tech-like) was also a fun addition.
Then came the rough animations: everything was fairly straight-forward, but still challenging: doing the dancing for the campfire scene was especially tricky, as I wanted it to have a good sense of movement and be made up of poses that would translate to good shadows (that would be projected on the wall behind the man). The website scenes (which I decided to section off with a blue colour scheme, instead of connecting them to the purple scene) were very simple, as it was mainly mouse and camera movements that I fully did with tweens. I managed to complete all the rough animation in time for the final presentations.
In terms of collaboration, I got my coursemates to help design some aliens for the final classroom scene, and a friend in the Sound Design course lent me his high-quality microphone to record a good take of the dialogue. I put it through some voice editors I found online to make it sound more “alien”, which I think worked out well enough.
The final presentation went well, and I was given some light feedback regarding timing and colour grading. Now I have to complete all the lineart and colours in just over a week: it’s a lot of work, and I’m not sure I’ll manage to get it all done, but I’ll do my best.