Studio brief 1 - The Other Side - Process and production - Process

I decided to explain my reasons behind my decision making and what tools went into the production of my final animation.

This is a screen shot of one of the two characters of my animation. I decided to keep my colour palette limited, as I wanted a simple but effective look to my animation. I made the background blue to represent the sky behind the character.

I decided to have a shaky look to my animation by drawing a frame, then redrawing the frame using the onion skin setting. This helped me created a more precise drawing within the frame, but still achieving that shaky look.

When using the paintbrush tool, I decided to keep the "Flow" at about 70%. This proved to create a more fluid line, that helped me achieve the sketchy look I was aiming for. I feel that this setting improved my drawing skills in Photoshop drastically as I found it difficult to become accustom to drawing in Photoshop. 

I also kept the pen size at 1 when drawing large scale images to create the sketchy feel, and the I would use the pen at 5-6 to create stronger lines if needed.

Here is the first shot of the fishes appearance in my animation. I do feel like I achieved the scratchy and rough aestethic I was aiming for, however the consistency of my varies throughout the frames. Even though sometimes it isn't noticeable greatly, here, the focal point of the shot is hindered. My aim with this shot was to have the fish be the focal point, son I decided to take into account the rule of thrds in order to create a successful shot. However, the fish seems washed out against the pale blue background, and the lines used to create the Boy are a lot thicker that I expected.

Originally I decided to do this shot in 1's. However, when I switched from working on a PC to a MAC, this shot was far too quick. Even though my intention was to have the shot to be swift and quick, I still wanted to maintain a consistent frame rate throughout.

One of the main technical issues I came across was switching between tablets, as well as switching between PC's and MAC's. I found that the two tablets that I used for this project created different lines because of the texture, and the quality of the tablet. I also found that the quality and frame rate would swap between being right and completely wrong when I loaded my animation on a MAC from working on a PC.

Another technical issue I came across was my labels for my layers. I found it fairly easy at first to keep on top of naming each layer, however, because I was constantly duplicating layers and switching layers around, the process got extremely confusing. Next time that a project requires me to use Photoshop, I will definitely stick to labelling as I feel that I wasted a lot of time figuring out which layers where which.