Evaluation.

The first thing that comes to mind that I would do better if I was to do this again, would be to organise myself better. Not time-wise, but saving my frames, their names, etc. 
After Effects really needs organised files to keep it in order and as to not confuse myself. I, however, found myself confused multiple times as I'd saved the files in folders that are in other folders, etc. So if I was to do it again, I would name the files more appropriately and have an order to my folders, before I even got to making the animation. Which was another bad habit I found myself doing. Instead of creating the characters and extra bits to add to them, I created them as I went along. I think maybe this was because I;
1. Wanted to see what it was looking like before I carried on.
2. I didn't really see how I was going to work the finer points until I had a play.
I still think even though these points would ring true if I did it again, that I should make the pictures and organise a folder to place them all in before, so that at least when it  came to having to make extra bits, I could keep the order going, and not just add new folders to existing ones.


All that being said, I'm quite proud of my final animation as I hadn't really had much experience making an animation from scratch before. I have made GIF images before, so I had an idea how it worked, but never had I made one from scratch, storyboarding, or used After Effect before. I hadn't really used Illustrator much besides the mentioned work experience that I did, either. 
I think the story I had in mind came out close enough to how I wanted it, of course it's not perfect. I'd of got Disney to do it if I was that picky. But I think it shows a clear understanding of my story, and I believe I told it in a clear way.


I always liked the thought of animation as a direction for my study choice, but although I find it fun and creative to design and make the characters, as well as thinking of a story, I do find the whole animating process tediously repetitive and gave myself a headache quite often. So I think it'll have to stay an occasional hobby, for now.

Finito.

Tweaked a few things again:

• shortening the beginning zoom (7 seconds, far too long!)
• adding moving lines to sliding bull scenes
• adding the matador passing out
• credits(the end)

Finito! 

Almost finished.

Reached the 30 second limit, but I may tweak some bits. Here is my 'almost' finished animation. 

Quick overview/changes explained.

So looking back over my animation I decided it was too 'simple' and so I've added extra little animations to the characters inbetween. This meant I had to change the design of one of the bulls, but only a small fraction, the tail, so that it could wiggle as it ran - I got this idea from the existing bullfight animation previously stated in an older post. I also added a background, and other small details reactions/actions. I think even though they're only little bits it's really began to make my animation come to life, and I find even though it's very time consuming, the end result it very pleasing and I enjoy the process. If I had drawn the animation frame by frame, my patience would've warn thin and I wouldn't of been able to create extra things as I'd be busy drawing rather than actually animating and I prefer to see development rather than wait till last minute to combine it together. It would be far too tedious for me to draw each frame out and not know if it was going as I wanted it to. This way, using illustrator, I can move part of the character, then move it back, or add to/take bits away, and still have it intact for if I need it again. It also allows me to use colour, which I think is always nice to have in a cartoon. I did some work experience at the end of last year as my own little side thing to uni, which gave me experience in Illustrator that I've found useful in this project.  (Making Sense - Workstation - Sheffield.)
(It would've been handy to have had experience with a graphics tablet, though. Mouses, or in my case, a mouse pad, isn't the easiest thing to draw on a computer with.)

tracing in illustrator

First of all I drew my characters as shown in previous posts, I then opened them in illustrator and traced around them, each feature including background colour, and outline, having it's own individual layer.

I did this with every one of my drawings, and was able to tweak them a little without redrawing them all, to add movement, then exported as a .png file, with a transparent background. However I didn't cotton on to how to do that until I reached this part of the animation, so the zoom-ins at the beginning didnt have this. I was going to go back and change it, but I didnt think it needed a background as it's just introducing the characters, and the background is to help show movement in my animation. 

background:

but to make it more in the background, I gave it a 50% opacity.

More character drawings

Drawn characters to trace in illustrator.

Smugly wearing cape.

grabbing cape 

edit: after drawing each arm movement seperately in illustrator, I found that exporting it had an unwanted, resizing effect, and therefore made it look awful. So I changed it somewhat so that I did have to change it too much to cause it to resize when exporting.

confused matador face to add to existing body

sliding bull

A few advertisements..

Here are a few advertisements I've seen on TV whilst doing this project:

T Mobile / Orange stop motion

Billboard Chat
Watch the ad...

Better quality video here

BBC2 Zoetrope