501 - Final Animations

During the writing of my project, I realised that my plan is too big, and for time and length reasons I decided to get rid of the fire element as well as the colour section of my project.

Here are the final three animations for my chosen elements:

I'm very happy with how these turned out, as they were quite challenging but I think also quite successful. Comparing these to my original animation you can definitely see a clear improvement, and each of these has much more appeal and energy to them. Learning the theory behind each element helped give me a strong foundation to then apply principles to. For example with the wate, I knew that the primary splash should ease into and then out of the peak - called the hangtime - so I made that last longer than reality in order to exaggerate the swingy timing. 

I decided not to loop the smoke animation as that would result in me trying to get the forms to match and detract from my focus on making the movement appealing, but I still think it looks okay. I think the smoke is probable the weakest of the 3, both due to the issue of how the forms morph together as well as the fact that I didn't inbetween it fully. 

I think the lightning was my favourite as it's quickness leads very well to experimentation with what you can get away with, and as it is only a few frames of drawings, I could spend time adding the glow to make it more effective. I think I could probably have exaggerated the angles to make them more extreme, rather than having the silhouette be mainly straight down.

For the style section, I did these four variations of the smoke:

I like how much you can affect the look of the smoke by only changing a few things, however I think if I had more time I should have done significantly different variations, as these are all fairly similar. In addition to that, to make this more successful in the context of my project, I should have put these in a scene and compared them that way rather than just on a white background.

I definitely think the two with shadows are the most successful as the shadows adds a graphic, contrasting aspect as well as describing the form of the smoke better than lines could. I find that the lines give more of a childish feel to the animations which could be good depending on what you're going for.