Kathryn Wall

Evaluation

At the start of this project my first hurdle was actually choosing what I wanted my project to be. With so much freedom I thought it should be easy, but when it came down to it I felt almost clueless. My ideas changed a few times in the first couple of weeks but I finally made a decision to look into the future of motoring. I went this route as car and car modifying is a hobby of mine, so I began researching and found the the future of cars seems to be electric. After a bit more researching I discovered that the UK aims to have 1.5 million electric cars on the road by 2020. Personally I had not seen many electric cars on the road to I thought that a way of encouraging new car buyers to go electric would be a great project.

I’ve found that many adverts on the TV focusing on how ‘green’ the product on sale is didn’t really effect me, and speaking to other people I realised that it wasn’t just me. What makes people buy a product isn’t what benefits the environment, it’s what benefits them, so for my animation I wanted to focus on the personal benefits of an electric car and not the green aspect.

The most important thing of this animation was the content. I researched into EVs and what the benefits were and made a survey to find out what people thought in general. There seemed to be a lot of misconceptions about EVs, so I thought this could be the reason for the slow sales. With this I was able to create a draft script of the main points I needed to convey in order to change the audience’s mind on these cars. With this script in place, I could draw up my storyboards and think about my illustrations I could include.

I did a lot of experiments in after effects before finally deciding on a style. This benefited me greatly as I had so many wonderful ideas in my head it was hard to actually get on with it. After testing out designs that I thought would be amazing, I could see that actually they weren’t portraying what I wanted. Once I has found the most effective look, progress was surprisingly very quick.

Now my animation is finished I can say that I’m very pleased with the result. It answers the brief I created for myself, solves the problem and shows my creative skills. Originally I wasn’t planning on adding a voiceover as i expected the animation to be shown in places were sound might not be available, e.g post office, council office screen etc, but now it is there I think it adds an extra dynamic to the animation. With the voiceover it feels more professional and opens up the opportunity for internet adverts, and maybe even television.

Most importantly I feel I fulfilled the brief, but what I am most proud of throughout this project is my time management. I constantly felt I was ahead of myself and when I was unable to work for a week, I still managed to finish my project for the deadline. Overall I see my first self initiated brief as a success.

Posted on May 2, 2013 with 1 note

Voice over added! I chose someone with a friendly, upbeat voice to read the script along with the scenes to give an encouraging vibe. I want my viewers to associate electric cars with a happy, good feeling.

Posted on April 23, 2013 with 1 note

Getting closer to a final animation. I’ve slowed things down and tried timing the transitions against music. I chose an instrumental version of Jack Johnson’s ‘Better together’ to give the movie a feel good atmosphere. I’m still deciding wether or not to include a voice over, but I’m afraid it might give too much of a formal tone. Few more tweaks to make but I think I’m getting there.

Posted on April 22, 2013

Further development. There is still a lot of tweaking to be done with timings, images and transitions, but I’m wanting to get my scenes all together as a rough first. A few more to go…

Posted on April 10, 2013 with 1 note

Trying out a new animation style and testing transitions

Posted on April 8, 2013

Test - animation style

Posted on April 5, 2013