Client Project: Evaluation

The objective of this project was to create an animation piece for The Nottingham Young Creative Awards, we would have to identify what our Target Audience would be and to ensure that the project would be appealing to this audience. The Nottingham Young Creative Awards Brief stated that we would have to create project themed Nottingham Loves… within one of the ten categories, of which I personally chose Animation and Digital Media.

For my project I felt that I had very good knowledge of Nottingham’s Nature and Wildlife, so this would obviously be the best subject to base my project on, I decided that my Target Audience would be children ages 3 to 7 and their parents, the reason I decided this was because I believe it would be nice to pass some of my personal knowledge on to the younger generations within Nottingham. Another reason for me choosing children as my Target Audience was that I have noticed that there are little informative documents that explain what is on offer in the area for children to do, this project would obviously give Nottingham citizens and tourists an understanding of what is available to them.

I believe that this design would probably work best being displayed on the information screens at Nottingham’s various transport stops, this is because the most direct and simple route into Nottingham City centre is by using is various transport methods, with the high traffic use of these methods of transport there is a higher chance of people seeing the design.

To ensure that my Target Audience would be interested in my project, I would have to ensure that my design was bright, eye catching and most of all informative. I played with many different ideas to determine what would be the best design, eventually I came to the conclusion that the design that would appeal most to the Target Audience was the 2D Pin Puppet design.

When structuring my project I first had to create a basic story board so that I could ensure that the project flowed smoothly, this was done by gathering all the facts which I wished to include within the design, and then creating a scene to fit each set of facts.

Once I had decided on all the scenes which would be included I then needed to create a background for each scene, this was done using Adobe Photoshop, to ensure that each scene was relevant to Nottingham I browsed the Internet and visited places around Nottingham to give me inspiration for my background designs. With the backgrounds complete, I then needed to create the Characters that would go in each scene, the Characters would be 2D Pin Puppets. Using Adobe Photoshop again I created each movement piece for each character, saving them individually, once all the pieces were designed I then imported them into one file where I was able to pin each segment together allowing me to move each piece individually.

After all the Characters and Backgrounds were completed I then imported them into Adobe Premier Pro, this is where I would create the complete scene. With each Character I had to create the Animation of their walk cycle or the motion they would be doing in that scene. This was done using the Puppet Pin Tool, this would allow me to use the characters I had created and animate each piece quite simply.

With all the Scenes now animated I needed to ensure that the sounds fitted correctly. For each scene I required a different ambient soundtrack and also the sounds that each of the characters would be making, these sounds clips were collected from a website called sounddogs.com. Using the sound manipulation software within Adobe Premier Pro, I was able to blend all the character sounds quite nicely and to ensure that each scene would blend with the previous and following scene without any overlap.

Overall I feel that my design worked rather well, with the sounds and visual blending quite nicely, I believe it was successful in its goal to deliver detailed and relevant information about the Nature and Wildlife in and around Nottingham to the Target Audience.

In future I will ensure that any text that is in a project does not overlap any of the animations that are taking place, I also feel that I could improve my time management skills, by setting myself miniature deadlines, this is to ensure that certain tasks are complete by a certain time, allowing me to focus all my efforts on the task at hand, and also giving myself a few completely empty days at the end of the project to ensure that if there are any modifications and improvements that could be made, I could make them quite simply. I feel that I could have also added some more sounds to the characters, this is because at points the backing soundtrack that runs throughout the entire design sometimes partially drowns out the ambient sound for some scenes.