Extended Practise: Kingdom of Masks Final Film

 Extended Practise
Kingdom of Masks Final Film and Evaluation

• This week:
• Khoa put together the final composite for Kingdom of Masks!
• What went well:
• As I had contributed a lot to this project, I was very proud of the amount of work I did and how I was able to balance this with another project. I, also, had to balance and organise my workload for the Post-Production, as I was working on three different projects at that point. 
• In terms of my contribution of 2D Animation, I think that I have improved significantly in animating human characters, of-which the Mask Makers' design is quite complex. We experienced issues with some members of the team not following the reference sheet too well, so when it came to inbetweening some scenes, I wasn't sure whether to follow the reference or follow the keys, to keep the animation visually appealing. 
• I think that my inbetweening skills have improved greatly over the course of this module, as I was becoming more aware of the forms moving, how to space and time inbetweens in order to achieve a specific movement and using smear frames for faster movements. I made use of both the Pencil and Brush tool for inbetweening in Toon Boom Harmony and learnt a lot about close-gaps, the clean-up process, colouring and trying to speed up my animating process. I, additionally, contributed to 2D VFX with the clouds of steam and smoke coming up when he pulls the sword out of the stones.
• I learnt a lot with post-production also, such as using the Puppet tool, using lighting effects, noise effect, etc. which is a great improvement from the editing I did last year.
• Here is the final film:

• What could be improved:
• There was a lot of stresses with this project, with the scale of it and the ambition. I think that I could have contributed much more with the 2D Animation, as I would have liked to do more keyframing or roughs, to improve my animating skills in faster-paced action sequences. This is something I would like to learn to do in the future, so I will be practising once I graduate.
• I would have liked to be more exaggerated and expressive with the movements of the Mask Maker, however as my main role was inbetweening, it was tricky to do with how it had been keyed. Again, this is something I'll need to practise alone.
• I need to improve on my use of the Puppet tool, as I had a few problems with it in Post-Production. I either over-used it or under-used it and I think it would be worth experimenting with it, with multi-layered characters.