Overall, I believe we achieved what we set out to, we made an animation that reflected the targets we set ourselves as well as the ones set for us by the brief. We engaged with narratives, designing and producing storyboards, undertaking tests, and creating animatics. As a team four of us came together, forming a strong bond to work together to fully develop this project. I personally benefited from being able to push myself and learn software like Adobe After effects and Premier Pro and play with audio and motion which I believe was very important to our success, as our video was chosen by Wessex Museums to be shown.

We were given set themes, with ours having the theme of The Ancient, and sub themes of Landscape and Superstition. We were also given a book we could base our narrative on, which was ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. We quickly decided as a group that instead of using Tess we wanted to use a poem that Tim Laycock introduced us to in his storyteller workshop. The poem, written by Hardy was called ‘The Mommet’.

Four of us within the group worked very well, however, we did have another member who did not apply herself and failed to communicate to us why this was, so I feel that this could have been improved on from their end. But four of us made a productive environment, with us going into studio to work, and calling often to establish where we were at. We had Eve and Dan on procreate drawing and Me and Harry on the digital side, putting stills and short videos from procreate into Aftereffects and Premier Pro, bringing them to life, as well as working with audio.

I was happy to take this roll as I was recognised as being strong with Aftereffects and Premier Pro, as I had previously used them. Despite this my skill level with this software has still improved greatly. Something that I certainly improved on was using and making audio, which I did from Premier Pro. We had collected a range of sounds from our audio workshop which on their own didn’t give the true sense we wanted, so I took it upon myself to play around, cutting up and overlaying different sounds to create the likes of fire, wind and morphing to name a few. As well as the audio I animated Dan’s landscape scenes as they were still drawings, I used a lot of zooming and opacity settings to give the feeling of movement and bring the trees and landscape to life. I did also animate a ribbon flying across the landscape using two still drawings of the ribbon and animating it to appear as if it moved with the wind. This took a long time and was a lengthy process, however it was then dropped as it was agreed it could look better in procreate which I did agree with, I do wish this could have been communicated earlier to save time.

Towards the end of the motion project, I was unfortunate enough to test positive for covid, which caused some communication issues for us as I was stuck working away from everyone else. The main issue this caused was when we made some changes after our final crit. An older version of the video was edited and then sent to me, which meant I had to re-do all the audio to sync it up as the older version was missing around 40/50 seconds worth of audio, which was a time-consuming task, thankfully I managed to complete this and I made sure that if anymore edits were to be made, make sure the latest version was used, which everyone took onboard.

Overall, I feel that the four of us who made up the spine of the group worked well together to create a motion video that spanned about one minute and fifty seconds and hit all the targets we were expected to in a successful manner.