See Hear - Final Animation

For my final "See Hear" project animation I decided to return to animating with oil paint. I also wanted to include the deer as a more prominent aspect of the final animation. With some thinking and a bit of sketching, I planned out some new additions and then drew an animated pencil test of the deer. I then rotoscoped this pencil test when creating the animation in paint.




I certainly didn't want an unhappy ending with that gunshot sound effect, so I animated the stag reappearing after the gunshot. The stag is really meant to represent the general forest-like/natural surroundings, with him just forming from the flowing lines and disappearing again etc, but I don't think this idea comes across very strongly, mainly due to the shortness of the animation. With a bit more planning I could have developed and strengthen this idea further.
The concluding scene of the deer was animated as I went along, rather than creating a pencil test first. I had an idea of how I wanted the animation to be like and I wanted to just see how animating straight out with the paint would turn out. Not having a rotoscope or the sound clip gave me freedom with this end scene. It would be nice to have had some more music or sound ( I didn't really find anything really suitable that fitted), as it looses a bit of flow at the end there due to the sound suddenly ending. But I was pleased with the resulting animation. The freedom of just animating directly with the paint meant I could re-do things or change little bits as I went along, and just see where the flow of the animation would take the scene.

So here is my finished and final paint animation:


See Hear Animation from Ali on Vimeo.

Overall, this was good practice for working with paint. The final animation took a few days to finish. I found paint to be fairly time-consuming and a bit tedious, but I really like the end result. Paint animation seems to have a very lively quality to it. I think it will always be a time consuming technique, but maybe with more careful planning and organising, it could be a really good medium to use again.
Next time I will also be more careful with objects left roundabout the camera - there are some very annoying shadows popping in at the edges of the screen!! And that is entirely my fault for not noticing they were in the shot while animating...