At first I decided that I was going to make my animation on ‘ABCya!’ as I knew how to work it well and its what I used for my mock animation, however I decided to use a different software called ‘Wideo’ I though it was nicer and a lot better to use. My first idea was to use stick men for my characters and have a dull background however I decided to change my idea, instead of the stickmen I used different coloured stars, black and white and have the two black stars playing football and then the ball would land in the white stars path, one of the black stars run away and then the white stars end up beating up the black star. I thought that this idea made my story a lot clearer and showed the topic of my story also, racism, I also think it using these shapes made my animation a lot easier to produce and effective. I experimented with different colours for my star characters however I thought it looked stupid and just used simple, obvious colours to make my animation more meaningful. For my background I used a park type of background as I think it set the scene for the animation.
I think I achieved my goals for this piece, my animation has turned out well, I think it looks visually interesting, like how the white stars move up gang up on the black star and also how they get bigger to show their dominance and I think stickmen would of not been eye catching at all. I chose to use the stars because when I used this new software I didn’t know completely how to use it, so I thought I would go with simple characters. I decided to look at a tutorial on YouTube to see how you animated the characters. So I started practicing with the movements and started to create my animation and liked how it was all coming together. I am pleased how my message comes across, my main message/topic is racism, it comes across is that two black stars and the other white stars are the ones moving in towards the black star, which visually means they are ganging up on the black star, so they are being racist. I think the audience will find it easy to understand, as my topic of story is quite simple to follow.
After getting comfortable with the ‘Wideo’ software I finally finished my animation after making 4 scenes. I am glad I used ‘Wideo’ as it made my animation visually interesting and understanding than I thought it would be, and now that I have used it and have gotten used to the tools, I don’t find it very hard anymore. On the software it had a sound tool so I could download any sound I wanted for my animation, I so I found a royalty free soundtrack and uploaded it to the software for my soundtrack, for this I used a sad soundtrack to go with my animation, which was quite easy. But if I had more time I would of found a better soundtrack and also added some sound effects to make it more interesting. For my animation I tried to export my work however I had problems with the software and it wouldn’t let me upload it to YouTube or my Vimeo account.
Overall I am pleased with how my animation has turned out however if I were to improve my animation I would choose a different backing song track and also maybe add more effects to my characters and also sound effects during editing to make it more interesting to the audience.