May 21

I'm finally finished! After all this time, I finished my animation at 1 minute and 20 seconds. It goes through the intro, first verse, and the first chorus of the song, and it's a mix of full-body shots, a close up of lip-syncing, and written-out lyrics and descriptions. It's not the best animation I've ever seen, obviously, but considering it's my first time animating, I'm pretty happy with the result. I learned a lot while making it, too. The software isn't as good as I thought it would be, and crashed repeatedly if I used any of a few select functions once I'd gone over about 600 frames. Since this is less than a minute, it's obvious to me that this app is meant for shorter animations and people just starting out. It also messed up my audio during playbacks, so I had to go back towards the end of the process and fix a lot of the timing, which was annoying, because I thought it was already timed correctly. I also learned that animation takes a lot longer than I was first anticipating. I didn't give myself enough time to create the quality of animation I was originally envisioning. I assumed it was enough time because I'd never really animated something before, so I didn't know how long it would take and what goals to set for myself. I know now that I need a lot more time for projects like this. even if the animation doesn't look that great, I learned a lot from this experience about animation and about how to go about using new skills. I actually was planning to use the entire song, but had to cut it short, and didn't really follow the "storyboard" I planned for the song either. I also learned how hard it is to fill time, and just how little time a frame really is. You can spend an hour working and only crank out one second of actual animation. It was frustrating and yet rewarding, until I remembered that I needed forty seconds for the intro before I could even get to the lip-syncing, which I knew would be easier to animate (it was, though not by much).
I'm finished and I'll probably present tomorrow, so this is my last post. Goodbye, internet! Thanks for reading.