Reflection - Interactive

For the past term with Steve we have been learning all about animation and how to use the program 'Adobe Animate'. Over these lessons I have learnt a lot about the program which I had little knowledge on before, and created many digital animations. We started by learning the basics of the program and understanding what it does for the first few lessons, then advanced onto learning it's specific tools and features. Since I started I feel like I have gained a lot of knowledge about digital animation and Adobe Animate. There's some things which I can still improve on like making longer animations or learning even more of the programs functions such as the bone tool, however I'm confident in making small animations using the variety of features I've already learnt.

One more thing which I learnt was how to incorporate my animations together into an interactive product using Adobe Muse, giving it the ability to become a functioning website or app. This is useful to know and produces a professional looking product.

This is the first animation I made in our interactive lessons
when messing around with the program. As you can see
I had some basic knowledge of the program prior to teaching.
It's fairly clunky and could be improved by adding more detail
or making the movements more realistic.

This is an animation I made in Animate to experiment with
motion tweens. Again it works but could have more detail.

This is an animation I made frame by frame to experiment with
the technique. It took a fairly long time to do however I was
pleased with the rough style result.

I made this animation experimenting with shape tweens, something
I had no idea how to use before these lessons. It was easy to do
and created a unique looking animation.

I created this scene using symbols to duplicate the penguins as
opposed to drawing them out repeatedly. This was a new skill
that I learnt.

This is a reference sheet I created for my character 'The Blob'. I learnt how to
do this in Steve's lessons and it turned out very helpful for when I came to
make animations for this character.

This is an animation I made of the Blob
eating for the final interactive product
I made. It's smooth and is a big
improvement from the first animation
I made. It could be improved however
by making it a little slower.

Production

For this project, I didn't need to record any wild tracks separately to add in to my project, as the report would just contain the reporters speech and idents created digitally.

I didn't need much administration for this project. All I had to record was 3 different news stories and an introduction and outro. I planned this by writing a script that could be read off.

When I composited the report in Premiere to take out the parts I didn't need and add idents, I made sure that the audio levels were suitable throughout by checking the Master Audio Levels. I adjusted the sound of all my clips so that they were around -6dB at all times, so no clipping occured.

Here's a screenshot of my timeline:

I also made album art for this news report so that at first glance the listener knows what the thing they've downloaded is. It also makes the report more professional.

Evaluation

Overall I think that this project went fairly well and was quite easy. The end product ended up sounding professional and is an effective broadcast which communicates short news pieces well with the listener. One thing which I could've improved on is equipment. I used a zoom h4n microphone to record the broadcast but I could've used an additional external mic connected to the Zoom for clearer speech recording. This would've been the most fitting setup for a news report.

Something which worked well was the script which made the report sound realistic and professional. This is because in my research I found examples of news reports and took note of how the reporters welcome in the audience and the language they use. 

Another thing which I could've improved is the ident, as it is very simple. I could've made it longer or added drums or something similar, similar to the idents I found when researching for this project. I made it using Logic Pro X (screenshot below). 

As you can see from this screenshot, the ident is only made from a simple melody and two chords. If I do this again I could try and use more complex chords or additional instruments.

In conclusion, I found this project fairly easy, however I should have spent more time planning the technical side so that I could have used the most effective equipment and more time making the ident.