Scott Grant
Evaluation
Inspiration
For the first step we were told to find images that give us ideas of "Future Environments" and Robo-Animals, and then create ideas for each of them for us to eventually put together into an animated piece.
At the start I was stuck in a confusion because when we were being told the tasks to do the wording for doing the Secondary Research page and the Inspiration page wasn't clear for me understand what to do first.
This lead me to default into drawing ideas stemming from what I could think of from the name "Future Environments" and the pictures our teacher included as they were the only things I could look into at that moment.
Later on I searched for future environments, specifically looking for cities, and pictures (like the Lofi-Girl and backgrounds from Sonic The Hedgehog games) that I realised would fit perfectly with my ideas.
Looking back at the sketches there are similarities to other things, which I detailed about in my Primary & Secondary Research page.
But yes there are similarities to other art pieces and some that are more direct references to others. Alongside more original ideas like the animal sketches.
The images I had found for the animals were mostly taken from searching "Futuristic Animals" or when I wanted something specific like drones I'd search for those specifically.
For the environments I didn't find images from a simple google search of "Futuristic Environments" so I searched for more specific images, a few were from a simple search on Google but the others I had used fan-wikis to find good quality images for.
I didn't talk about my work with any peers.
During production I kept checking the Brief incase I had missed any requirements, and with the images for Futuristic Animals generally being half-normal half-cybernetic it inspired me to create the bird and crocodile.
Overall I can take genuine pride in what I've made for this, the animals being my favourite of the three pages. I think they're my most well made sketches and creative yet.
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Future Environment
Evaluation/Reflection
When creating the project I was having several different ideas that kept changing. If you look back at the Inspiration page I put a large amount of focus onto city areas, bright lights, advertisements, and so on, but when you look at my final result with the gif I didn't use any of that theming.
I changed it due to the name of the project, "Future Environment", mainly for the Environment part of it. I felt that a bright neon cityscape didn't fulfil the project name. I also felt that since I already chose the Crocodile as the animal and that a crocodile wouldn't fit easily in a bright city.
However I'm not sure what made me choose a mixture of a swamp and forest with a river.
One reason could be that one idea I had would've been the Crocodile broken in a desert with a loop of the land regrowing and then being destroyed again, which then caused me to have an idea of the Crocodile not being broken.
Another reason is how I remembered a scene from a David Attenborough show where birds were standing on top of a crocodile in a symbiotic relationship.
In the artwork the factory in the background was put in as a continuation from the original city concept, along with a more realistic idea of a future environment with its inclusion.
This project was the first time I had used Animation software in a major way. Previously we had tested out Adobe Animate and were going to use it again for this project but plans were changed and we did this one in Photoshop instead.
Despite the short amount of time we had with the software I think I had got an understanding of it. I even managed to do some techniques, things like using keyframes to make layers move suddenly without tweening and making them appear quickly with their opacity.
It was fun to test with, learning what I can do. But it was my first time and as such they'll be some kinks with it. In my last piece I was going to have the moving leaves move without tweening, however I accidentaly didn't put any keyframes in the same spot before the new keyframes which caused the tweening
The Crocodile eye also had issues, mainly because when making the same-spot frames I didn't put them in the exact same spot so the eyes ended up looking like the Crocodile had a lazy eye.
The water animation that I made is something that I'm quite proud of. It took a while to make as there were 7 layers each. but I can say that it's a nice result. I liked my addition of water stains on the crocodile to make it feel more real.
If there was something that could be change it'd be to make the water flow more naturally, with frames between each second, where the keyframes were placed, and make the water reach higher.