•How would you describe the process of creating and polishing the artifact?

            This project was originally created in my GRA-211-X4535 Interactive Animation 19EW4 class. As this was my first time creating an animation, this was certainly a new experience. However, like learning most things, I adapted, and my animation professor told me that I had created one of the best animation projects in class. While I had previously understood that animations take an exceptional amount of time to make, I never really grasped exactly how much until I made one myself.

            In creating this project, I used Adobe Animate and a mouse to draw each key frame. In places where a visual object simply grew, shrank, or moved from one side of the screen to the other, I was able to make use of motion tweens. However, in scenes where a stickman walked about for example, I had to copy the previous frame and modify the positions and sizes of each line to mimic joints and limbs.

•What did you learn as you were creating it and improving it?

            While creating this project, I learned how to use Adobe Animate, how frame by frame animation is created, and learned exactly just how much time goes into a single real time second. Also, I refreshed my memory on the 12 laws of animation. This was something that I briefly learned about before as it is closely related to game physics.

•What challenges did you face?

            As my subject for the animation was inspired by Allen Becker’s Animation vs Animator series, I had started my project with a “camera” element so I could have an easy time managing the “zoom” of the “viewport”. Unfortunately, Adobe Animate had conflicting software errors with the “camera” layer when I wanted to make the animation interactive. So, I had to remake the first chapter of my animation so that I could manually simulate the effect of camera zoom by resizing every visual element that was on screen.

•How did you incorporate feedback as you made changes to the artifact?

            I have not received any specific feedback from my capstone professor other than that it was good, so I can only assume that my project was perfect and keep moving forward.

•How was the artifact improved?

            I added more in-between frames to help slow down the “movement” speed of some of the characters and to smooth out the overall animation.