Final Statement

At first, the project started with me going down quite a different route. I wanted to display this idea that people of different appearances didn't have to be at a same conventionally attractive level to be acceptable. The project developed in to how females deal with the issues surrounding their appearance, mainly due to me realising the earlier idea for the project was more based on the idea that I don't see myself as conventionally attractive and in a harsh society where the majority of men will probably see a woman who looks like the opposite to me (slim and white) as attractive, finding outliers whether it were straight girls, boys, lesbians, bi-sexuals or gay men who adored the way someone who didn't fit the conventional idea of beauty, would be extremely refreshing and stop me from making a conclusion that I have to make sure my personality perfect if I want any romantic relations with anybody.

But the more I thought about why I wanted to do this, I felt like the reason for why wasn't following the right path. I needed to look in to why I cared so much and why it has haunted my life as a teenage girl. There are problems in the world far worse than feeling undesirable but when it gets to the point where self hate comes out of the mental and in to the physical, things can get very scary. I witnessed it from four of my friends and advice from one of their doctor's during her struggles with anorexia, even if it kind of worked, was 'you know most guys won't want to go out with a really skinny girl.' This was scary how much we saw value in the way men looked at us.
So I went out of relationships and in to the positive vs. negative experiences with females and their bodies. I exaggerate the word females rather than women, in reference to sex rather than gender, ainly due to even trans men dealing with fighting against the expectations of a person with a vagina having to conform to feminine dresses or sexy lingerie.

I feel like the most stressful part was simplifying the bundle of research already gathered. I had a lot to look at, to work out what message I was planning on specifying in my animation. In a way, I had gone from a more specific idea to a more complicated one. Issues with how a female feels about their body is so much more than just about how she wants to look attractive to the boy she finds attractive. However, I did piece together the right information and set a steady foundation on what I wanted my concept to revolve around.

When it came to animating, I think what was not so successful was not having a definite idea that I could start animating soon enough. By doing this, it would have left me more time to work on sound such as recording voices for characters, collecting and putting background noises together. However, I am happy with the outcome. What was expected was somewhat achieved with a bit extra. An animated music video. At a later date I could add different sounds. I have other songs I'd wish to put an animation to and next time I think I'll try different mediums. After a while, I felt stuck and not able to experiment with textures due to the simple block colours the Flash software provides for animating.

I was given a lot of helpful advice from peers and staff that helped form my main ideas. Questions helped me put together what I needed to make clearer and what messages I had to try and exaggerate the importance of and their necessity to the story. However, I will admit I felt very driven by more of my ideas than anyone elses. It could be seen as a positive but to some extent it kept me a bit closed minded from a few suggestions seeing as I wanted to get away from doing yet another load of research that I had already been looking at. Next time, I intend to take suggestions a bit more seriously and dedicate some time to looking in to them more but keep in mind that I know what I'm passionate about and it being my project, with a message that effects me most, should prioritise what I see important.

All in all, I think the project went the way I wanted it to. There were a few problems but they were small and not too hard to deal with. I feel like this is the first project I have achieved something with a medium I see important to me and a subject that I see important to me.

Finished Editing on Entire Film

Finally, after animating the credits, I ended up putting together all the scenes which I had animated and exported to mp4s separately. Due to the last scene not being able to save properly in the production stages, I had to make sure I had as many copies and different file formats to have just in case. 

In the end, I was able to balance out the music beside the film and make them compliment each other. They were in tune with the mood of the scenes and the rhythm of each other went fairly well. 

There weren't too many problems apart from the credits being quite short but I just made the animated titles loop for a bit to lengthen them out and give the audience a chance to read them properly. 

I feel like I could have added more sound rather than simply music but when it came to it, I think most of the project's time spent on researching, preparing to animate and actually animating, meant I couldn't do too much when it came to pieceing the sound together.

Editing Last Parts of Music

Already I had been working on the actual song I was hoping to use, for a while, so editing it to be used in my animation really consisted of tidying up what was there and cutting the original song down from 7 minutes to 1 minute.

Cutting the song down.

Editing the sound levels.

It was quite sad having to chop out some of my favourite parts but the reality of it was to cut it down or do a hefty load of more animating which I didn't really have the time for when i already had a good simple story and scenes. 

I think if I stuck to my original plan of creating a song from scratch, it would have been a lot harder with working a lot on something completely different from the prior skills I needed to develop and present in this project. 

I think working on my music for myself rather than having a strict deadline is quite nice because what comes out of it is always very natural and it can be added to whenever without worrying about what's necessary and not. From that I can always have something to use for background music and cut out what I find unnecessary for the certain project.

In order to match the song well with the film, I plan on editing the a good fade in, fade out intro and outro. I think this could be done well with the opening title and end credits. 

Animating Scene 5

For this scene I found it quite worrying to get done. There was something wrong with my Flash software due to the fact it wouldn't let me save, so I had to hope for the best that nothing crashed and keep going till it was finished. 

Because of not being able to save all of the changed in the scene, I have only been able to document the importing and presentation of the backgrounds.

Like the backgrounds in the other scenes, I created them by hand, using watercolour paints and then scanned them in. In this scene I had to create a similar sunset like composition with rectangle shapes of buildings in the foregrounds. 

I came across a tutorial by my favourite artist/illustrator, Emmy Cicierega, which showed how to make a brush in photoshop that looked like rain drops. From this I was able to save images of my background where I added in the drops bit by bit. 

The scene of the girls coming together under the umbrella and giving and accepting help from each to shelter from the rain is meant to show the positive and kind attitude which girls should try and have for each other to fight against the negative influences which most girls get taken over by.

With animating the last scene, I had to exaggerate the character's expressions when communicating with each other as well as to the audience. It is one of my favourite parts about animating, as I enjoy putting across the feelings of the characters in to the story.

Animating Scene 4

This is the rather important scene where we see the interesting ways that the remaining characters try and take down the 'perfect' giant woman. 

In this part I wanted the insides of the giant woman to hint to a number of what our insecurities revolve around.

I feel like in this part I could have exaggerated the giant woman's faces of pain a bit more seeing as they were fun to do but don't go so noticed.

I was happy to be able to re-use the water colour waves again in this scene where a whirlpool begins to curl around the characters.

I found this scene quite enjoyable to create seeing as it consists of a lot of exciting movements and action. The next scene will be a lot more settled down with more expressions of the characters being their main part of communication to each other and the audience which is good for a balance between the ways I've been animating during this part of of the film. 

Backgrounds and Animating Scene 3

I scanned the pictures of waves which I had animated by hand on paper and coloured with pink watercolour paints and improved them with a photoshop brush that imitates water colours. I then deleted the white space and saved them as png. files.

I did this with each frame of the waves and put them in to their own layer on flash. 

This transitions in to us going under the waves and seeing the characters floating around and transforming in to their 'perfect' versions of themselves (e.g. a disabled girl having fit able-legs and an older woman transforming in to a young school girl). In this part I shortened my time animating the people from areas of the screen to simply copy and pasting the images around the screen to show their movement. 

The next part to animate I think was, similarly to the head shake, very hard in trying to get perspective and angles of the body right in the movements. It has the main character throwing a high heeled shoe towards the camera. These animated parts, however, I find the most exciting to do, because in cases where I get it a bit right, it turns out looking really nice.

With this scene I think I have shown different ways of animating. From hand drawn to digital, to moving around simple still images. Again, I feel like I am moving at a good pace and am thinking, maybe I could re-use the waves for another scene. 

Backgrounds and Animating Scene 2

With these two backgrounds, I made them from one background and zoomed in to a section where I felt the colours worked well (e.g light floor to darker sky for the panning up of the giant woman's feet to face).

This background I had the less blocky and not so balanced colours of the girl's lilac skin contrast with the flawless and smooth block colour of the giant woman's magenta skin colour.

In this part I had to try and establish a good turn of the head so I roughly sketched out a sphere turning before adding the facial features and then the block colour of the skin.

The last part was animating the hands, unscrewing and applying lipgloss from a bottle which will go in to the next scene where the lipgloss will fall from the bottle and create waves all over the ground and take up the people and in to the waves. I plan on creating the waves in fluid water colours so will have to probably do these on to paper rather than digitally. 

I feel like after this scene, I'm coming along with the film at a good pace.