Responsive: Do It In Ten - Chilly

For my first brief I decided to do Show me the Animation's Do It In Ten challenge. The brief consisted of creating a 10 second animation that followed the theme of the word they had chosen for that month (December's being chilly). This animation could be created however you wanted it to be and could be of anything regarding that it stayed within the theme and didn't contain any inappropriate themes, as this site it available to children.

I liked the sound of this brief, as I felt that it would give me the opportunity to create something a little silly and to just create something for the sake of animating. I really wanted a relaxed brief to help me get back into the swing of animating and I also didn't want anything too serious, as I don't really like focusing on serious topics. I saw this as an opportunity to practice my digital animation and to work on creating more simplistic styled characters, as I have found that my drawing style has been too realistic in the past and I haven't liked my work as much due to the fact that my style has been quite difficult to animate. 

Thinking about the theme chilly I instantly thought of polar bears and decided to create my idea based around a polar bear. My thought process was quite simple and I decided to do a polar trying to catch fish simply because I was eating fish at the time I was thinking of an idea and due to me not having very long to complete the brief (7 days) I went with the first idea I came up with. 

Storyboard

I completed this brief over the Christmas break and I must admit that I planned my time very poorly, which led to me rushing this animation and ultimately to me being a little unhappy with the outcome and a few technical hitches. Despite this however, I feel that I have managed to successfully complete the brief and fulfill all of the criteria they were looking for. Due to my poor time management, I didn't actually do any character design, but more just went with what I drew because I was short on time and didn't feel that I would have been able to complete the task before the deadline if I had spent time on designing a character. Despite this however, I am extremely happy with my character and I feel it fits in very well with the overall animation. In terms of actually animating however, I do feel that more care could have been taken with attempting to keep the volume steady throughout, as there are a lot of frames in which the characters increase and decrease in size. Although it doesn't look too bad, I am still very unhappy with it, as I feel that if I had given myself more time, I would have been able to take more care with making sure this didn't occur so often or as much. 

Another issue I had with this brief was the site was temporarily down when I tried to submit my work. This made me very frustrated at the time and flustered, as I thought I was going to miss the deadline, however, it was a fault on their end, which they resolved and my entry finally got accepted. But I did end up accidentally sending the wrong animation so my entry unfortunately has no sound, although I feel that this isn't a major set back and it is something that I can deal with. 

Overall, I am quite pleased with how I managed to deal with this project despite the fact that I was terribly unorganized and didn't focus on this brief as much as I should have. This brief has also made me think of how I tackle other briefs for this module and in general and it has given me a huge insight into how much time each brief will take roughly. It has also made me see that I will have to plan my time out efficiently and I intend to do so in order to avoid the same problems I encountered with this brief.