OUAN505 - Animating 'The Lungs of the World'

The way we were producing this particular animation meant we relied heavily on simple movement and visual accompaniment to the narration as oppose to sophisticated movement as it would have been too much information for the audience and could have been overwhelming. The animation for the 'lungs of the world' scene was an example of this very simple movement to illustrate the point being made in the voice over. After Effects was used to create the simple level of animation we needed and it was no different here. I prepared the assets in Photoshop and made sure to keep everything on a seperate layer so that any aspect of the scene could be moved and adjusted later. The right lung in the scene was comprised of three different sections each getting progressively smaller so that they could be removed from the scene and it would appear like the lungs of the forest were in a sense, shrinking away or being removed - relating back to deforestation. Even though I wasn't originally part of the production team doing smaller tasks like this one meant that the work was divided a bit more equally during the production process and also made it so that both Callum and Gavin don't have to worry about this scene and can concentrate on the others. It just made sense for me to take on some more work since I wasn't meant to be doing anything during the production stage. I don't really like the regimented system that was implented in our group at the beginning. Gavin opted out of pre-production as the project began so it meant it was shared between Callum I, with myself doing the majority because Callum was planned to also work on the production stage most. I think if we had all split the project up more equally across all stages it would mean that the project would have been a lot quicker and more work would have been done. I recognise that everyone has their strengths within processes like this and that's where the division of labour comes in, but at the same time if we had implented a 'lead' for each section of the process with the others in the group helping where they could I think it would have been more efficient and allowed us to move through the project at a much quicker speed that we have been.

This scene was a very easy scene to do but nothing of any real difficulty was really present in the animation side of the project as we relied on the shapes of paper cuts and the visual side of things more than the movement. Perhaps some other aspects could have been moved like clouds in the sky or the sun setting to make the scene more interesting. At the same time however, I was concerned that if too much is going on the audience won't pick up on the significance of the sections of lungs dissappearing and the scene wouldn't have the impact we desired.