The research done with mood-boards and colour palettes was necessary and helped a lot with the final outcome of this animation. Examples to show this are; the final mood-board chosen (The warm tones) provided an atmosphere to work from which was a bright composition with a smaller darker part of the composition. This is shown in my final animation with the two sides of the main protagonist Chonker’s is the embodiment of a lighter and darker side. This inspired the title as well as ‘Duality’ meaning ‘an instance of opposition or contrast between two concepts or two aspects of something; a dualism’- Oxford Dictionary. This links back to the contrasting atmosphere from bright to dark in the same composition. Another part where the research really assisted with creating this animation is in colour palettes. From choosing a specific mood-board I was able to create a loose colour palette that turned into a jumping off point for the background lighting and colour choices. As an animator that focuses on character creation the most this helped a lot to efficiently create the backgrounds since the vision came together much faster with a certain atmosphere in mind.
My concept of Duality comes across well because of staging and composition. The camera angles were used to show the Duality between the ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Chonker’s. An example is after the wide shot of both of the chonker’s being established the ‘Good’ Chonker’s is looking up at the camera while the opposite is shown for the other. This is a huge contrast since these scenes are showed right next to one another. The staging helps show contrast too since the shot goes from being wide and showing both of them to being very up close with the two protagonists. Character design also helps link the two as dual versions of each other. The colour scheme is an easy way to prove this as blue and orange are complimentary colours (Colours that are opposite to one another in the colour wheel). As well as the characters being carbon copies of each other but flipped in many details. All of these details bring my concept in not just the characters and backgrounds alone but in the staging and composition as well. A way to improve this however is adding a scene at the end where it shows the two combining. Showing they are truly two sides of the same coin to the audience.
When creating the key-frames I followed my X-sheets quite well. However since I am still very much new to using these they could be far more improved with drawing some key-poses out on the page before drawing anything on the animation program, this would have helped so much in the pre-production since drawing some key-poses out there was an realisation that some poses should have had some more key-poses which in turn then fell very short when adding in-betweens to them. I will try to do this next time. Another problem I solved was the issue of overworking. There was a scene I revisited and re-drew the next day since the original sketch I made for it with the in-betweens was not as lively as the rest of my animation causing the actions to look lacklustre and unpolished compared to the previous frames. I knew this was because of my long working hours causing myself to become more oblivious to the animation I was creating. This is not a good practice and should be stopped. If I had took a short break it could have made me more efficient by not having to re-draw an entire scene that I was not happy with. This could have been the time were I would have done the next step of line art instead.
I am very proud of my final outcome as it is a good representation of what I can achieve in such a short amount of time. This outcome has very good in-betweens and lip sync since the audio is quite fast the amount of lip sync is a lot but I did well to present the lyrics so it was easy to understand. My time management was on point as I was able to bring something new to every lesson with good quality assets to help create my animation as well. I enjoyed learning about a new program too and would use Toon-boom again in the near future for animations. Overall I did very well with only a few improvements my pipeline could be even more efficient and more polished than this time with using Toon-boom.
