Final Critical Reflection

Final Critical Reflection

Some of the most interesting learning outcomes of the course was the process of art and design and how it relates to inspiration artefact and forefront practices. This mixture really gives to the creative process a string methodological approach that can show results in the artefact. At the beginning we had a scrip but I as art and design director had to find a way to express with images the art concepts that we wanted to evidence. The use of reference was a very important technique to define the look of the short film and the personality of the characters. For example The Pink Panther was one of the biggest influencers that's not just help to define the look how also the characters move and interact in the short film.

In this way, you can see that the characters have long legs, this special physical characteristic gives to the character a funny, mysterious, non conventional way to walk as old style cartoon; very exaggerated in its movements. In the same way, The kid hair styles are a classic of cartoons like Dennis the Menace, which tried to evoke a rouge personality. All this elements from inspiration and undestanding of artistic artefacts contributed to each characteristic of the art and design of the film.

Other learning outcome of this short film was the understanding of the animation concepts. We have learned from class all the concepts and theory like weigh, overlapping, timing, spacing, however, you I only start learning when I have to apply it in the real animation. It's only practice the tool and technique to success in a well done animation. For example, in the rigging process of the Thief character we needed a lot of squash and stretch to achieve our goal of a more cartoon style which doesn't answer extrictly to physical laws. since we had a exaggerated look we needed a exaggerated animation in special in thief character. After, a lot of practice I achieved a very well done rigging with excellent performance that can performance a very smooth animation that express exaggerated movements but in a proportional way. 

One important learning outcome is how the communication of the story has to link with the technical development and movements that can contribute with the telling of the story. In this way, we didn't have dialogues between the characters, in result we used other techniques to communicate like the facial expressions. There is a big difference of techniques in these two characters: one is the use of controls to change the geometry and the other much simpler and clever is using 2d textures, which allocated a sequence of images of the expressions to a 3d object. The most interesting issue of using this 3D and 2D technique was that it separated the two main characters conceptually, It clarifies that they come from different worlds and realities.

Finally, what I learned is the importance of lighting and compositing in a short film. We had a final animation, however it couldn't reflect in many moments the atmosphere and the feeling we wanted the audience to feel through our visuals. In this way the lights and the composition are great tools to give the final look and feel that transmit emotions to an audience.