Animation Process and equipment

I am using After effects mostly for my animation but i am also including some stop motion as well. I think these two methods together work for the music i have chosen for the video because it is quite unpredictable and sporadic.

My process started with Initial idea planning. Thinking of lost of different ideas and noting them down. Then analysing which ones are better than others and which ones have certain aspects that could be used with other ideas to strengthen them. The main goal of the animation is to suit the music which is in the video (Saukrates- Father Time)

StoryBoarding.
Although my storyboard ended up slightly altering from the animation. It is the crucial guide lines for  my animation. I storyboarded 6 scenes with 16 shots. Noting the character and assets movement, effects, text, audio and style

Asset creating
Before I could start animating on After Effects I had to create my assets that I was going to animate. I did this in Illistrator and made things like, Backdrops (grass, walls, sky etc.) Then I made characters and other elements like props for the characters to hold

Animation
I was using After Effects to animate so this involved the movement and adjustment of key frames to create character movement, Placing layers on top of other layers to get the desired compostion for my animation. I used a screen size of 1280 x 720

How far into Animation i am

My animation at present is incomplete, I have done around 1 minute of animation and still have a large portion of more complicated animation to do. have done 3 scenes out of  6 planned scenes. Overall I think it is going quite well but I need to improve the speed at which I do it at.

I still need to create a few new assets. I would be using illustrator to do this. I have found this is one of the most time consuming parts of the process so I am budgeting for this asset creating time.

I think to speed up my animation process time I will do a mix of a few techniques, including spot animation so I can get on with finalizing the process and creating an animation I am happy with in a time frame that will be quick enough.

Octonauts, pokemon, t.m.n.t, advernture time character analysis

P2 Final design analysis

My character has been stylized is relation to his characteristics. I have used a lot of straight lines and hard edges which reflect the attitude of the character. He is a very strong willed and determined character.  These hard lines also are because of his athletic qualities that are essential to his role in the animation. He is a dynamical stylized character who is created for action scenes and adventures.

I have created the body shape with short legs in comparison to the body and the head. Which is to reflect the hip hop style of the character. Resembling bboy characters. Also he is in urban styled clothes. A hoody and black jeans. These are fitted baggy to once again resonate with this hip hop stylized aspect of the show

Scheduling research

This reasearch has shown me the difference in time that it makes to create different animations and how their different mediums vary the production time. Its seen that  feature length animations like Frozen can take 2 years where as others  like the Simpsons and Adventure time are reasonably complicated 2d cell animation they will take anything from 8-9 months to complete. Where as simpler animation styles like South Park has a production length of only 6 days

StoryBoard Analysis

Idustry standard?
I think on the most part my storyboard resembles some industry standard examples. Although some of the movement and artistic technique used in industry standard storyboards is higher than mine. Noticeably on scene 3 shot 2 the movement could de depicted better.
Clarity?
Most scenes display what is going on resonably clearly and all major actions can be seen and interpreted
Could they be given to an animator?
I believe an animator could successfully build an animation around these storyboard without any other sources.
I also this they express the thought care and efort put into them. Although sometimes with limited detail all the postioning, movement and camera angles have been considered carefully