Evaluation for Final animation

We are asked to create an animation for our final task in our unit. We first devised ideas as to what our animation will be, so placed our ideas on a mid map which we wrote down key words we could think of which would be important to our idea, we had come up with three separate choices to then choose one of the ideas. I was in a group with someone else and we both discussed for which animation concept we should do. We ended up going with the choice which was Lego object animation. This type of animation is a form of stop motion which involves the movement of any non hand drawn objects which are not fully malleable. So the next stage once we decided was to do a storyboard, which we follow for when we animate the characters, Its useful to have a story board for production as you have a planned idea and know what to follow as a guide rather than just improvise on the day.. We needed some equipment to complete this task which was, a webcam which allowed us to take the pictures and have them viewed on the computer. This means we had to use the application "motion camera" on the Apple mac, this was so we we could see each shot at it is taken so we knew what to move in order create a consistent animation between the different frames .It is a long process for object animation as you have to move the objects to create a fluid motion with the characters, however for cut out animation it is a much simpler process and takes far less time to create an animation. A negative for doing this animation is you cannot have movement in the face for the characters so you can only covey non verbal communication from the movement of the body of the characters. Some people viewed my animation and said a positive was the use of sound and character animation, which matched fairly well, however a negative is that I had a large amount of camera angles changes, this was because we had characters in different locations. My opinions match with theirs, however I noticed that the animation was quite fast at points, however it was difficult to slow it down. My favourite shot was my character lifting an object which showed the movement of an object.