FX Blog - Conclusion

Effects animation is a medium younger than character animation, yet with the rise in technology the process behind creating incredible and dramatic elemental magic has spread out. Despite this, “the background knowledge of how to bring our artwork to life has not changed. Only our paintbrush has changed”, Gilland (2009, p. 12). Without the knowledge gained from studying life and learning the theory behind effects animation and the specific elements I covered, my animations may be visually pretty but would lack that true appeal, shown when you compare my original animations to my new ones. The foundations are so important because knowing how something moves allows you to then build on that, therefore most importantly, understanding of the theory and fundamentals is what makes effects animation appealing.

I knew that by the end of this project my animations would not be professional quality, but I didn’t expect how much I would actually learn, and how useful that information was. Animating the effects at the beginning of this project was frustrating - I knew roughly how things were meant to move but I didn’t fully comprehend it, nor did I understand the forms of the elements. My drawings were awkward and the movement was clunky. The animations at the end fixed all this, with the drawings being more believable and the animation having more energy to them, therefore I definitely can say I improved.

Whilst theory and fundamentals are the most important, the visual style of the animation has a lot of power too. Not only is it necessary to stylise in order to actually animate the elements, but with few changes the effect of an animation on the audience can be significantly altered. As I was focusing on just the elements on their own it is harder to see how important this would be, however where this really becomes vital is when the fx is part of a scene. There, proper attention should be paid to the shape language and cleanup style so that it creates the right emotional response that both fits with the story as well as the animation’s overall style.

With any form of frame by frame 2D animation, you have to create everything from scratch. This means that knowing your theory is vital as you have no computer to generate it for you, but it also means that you have much more control over your animation. I found that I could really easily tweak timings, scale, anticipation and exaggeration to suit how exactly I wanted the effect to work.

After doing this project, I believe that whilst the skill floor for animating appealing 2D fx is higher than other mediums, the skill ceiling is exponentially so, as there is no limit but time and your imagination.