"Crafty Friday" - Balázs Szabó

Crafty Friday

Critical Evaluation

My first professional practice, live brief project, I was focusing on creating a short, snappy and dynamic seven second animation for St. Wilfred’s Hospice.

The aim of this short moving imagery was to make something positive out of a given subject that has a negative reputation and stigma generally, and to encourage families and people to not only go there and learn arts and crafts but more importantly spend time with those that are in need of care.

After researching different craft activities, I found sewing and puppets that are made out of different cloths interesting, because in a way it reminds me of the people in the hospice, a lot of diverse people representing one place.

So that thought gave me the idea to go and find materials and fabrics with warm patterns, which I then scanned in and by using the rubber tool cut out digitally in Animate CC, then reassembled my character from the off-cut patterns.

Messenger pigeons gave me the idea to make my character a bird that will fly across the scenes, revealing “Crafty Friday” on the screen as if it was spreading the message to people to come and join the fun.

Setting key frames in the beginning has helped me to actually create the animation by creating individual frames throughout the process. I then simply designed my background by using coloured rectangles and the “Brush” tool.

This gives a simple, child-like feel to the first seen.

In this scene my character walks in and being established.

He/She/It then flies off, to a new scene where the environment is the character’s home, a textile background. Sort of like wanting to make the viewer feel associated with the character by going to a home like place like “St. Wilfred’s” Hospice.

For the background I photographed a part of a textile room.

As the bird flies across the “stage” He/She/It slowly reveals the text/title of the project “Crafty Friday’.

For this effect I set the opacity from 0-100 gradually, and added motion tween so that the software faded it on.

The only problem that occurred after creating and submitting this short animation was the shadow behind the letter “C”, which isn’t much of a major issue, plus it can be fixed easily, but it annoyed me that I couldn’t recognise that before submitting it. It is definitely a lesson not to make for next time in the near future.

The sound effects of the bird walking and the bird’s wings flapping added a life to it in a subtle way. I also wanted to keep it fairly simple, as I knew that the hospice is still going to do add some more of their information to it.

Previous Ideas for “Crafty Friday”

-      The reason I didn’t proceed with these ideas in the first place is because they were too complex for the start as I didn’t have enough experience using Animate CC to create it in a short amount of time. Also, the length of the required animation was too short to cramp lots of information in there, and in my opinion, it would have just overwhelmed the viewers with confusion.

I learnt it’s better to keep it simple. That way I can always add to it.