I ended up being very happy with how my daydream project turned out. I finally managed to pick a subject that struck the balance between something that would be fun and interesting enough for me to feel motivated to work on (and spend a lot of time animating) that was also simple and easy enough to actually be able to execute. With my second project and especially my first, I picked a subject that was too serious or too ambitious, but I was very happy to find a subject this time that was both simple and fun. I can’t believe I almost picked a topic as ambitious as exploring an entire alien city! There is no way I would have been able to execute the project as well as I did if my subject had been that complex.
Perfecting the idea of minimum viable product ended up being an important skill I had to develop and adopt. With how little time I had to finish the animation, I had to learn to prioritize having at least a little bit of animation everywhere over having very high quality animation in a few spots. It was very tempting to fall into perfecting a few sequences, but I’m glad I spent time making the entire project presentable first.
Editing and balancing sound is super time consuming—I spent far more time on that than I expected to.
Animation is very fun and satisfying but very time consuming. I need to find a better way to color animations because that ended up taking a lot of time and effort for a VERY small amount of detail. Spending time coloring each frame and doing shading or more dynamic colors/backgrounds/character designs looks like it would take far too much time, so I need to find a better way to do that than simply fixing every frame to be able to use the fill tool, or even worse, hand painting all of the color.
That being said, it really was super satisfying watching the animation come together. For some bits I felt like I was on a roll, and the animation for those bits turned out pretty smooth—I felt good about it!
I enjoyed watching my skills improve as I continued the animation. I felt much more confident about the quality of my animation towards the end than I did at the beginning!
The hardest scene to animate were any scenes that included a lot of greebles at once who were each doing their own thing. Animating one character is difficult because of how many times you have to draw them, but animating MANY characters is so much worse. In future projects I make, I will either be very careful to either not include many dynamic characters in one scene, or I will find a clever way to animate them as little as possible while still getting the point across.
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