Survey Result Summarisation and Project Evaluation.

After getting all the questionnaires back from the people who viewed my work I was able to summarise the results and evaluate the project as a whole.

Final Major Project - Questionnaire Summary and Project Evaluation

The results of the surveys I created to gain feedback on my project were reasonably informative. I created two different surveys for this project, one for adults to be distributed between my classmates and the teachers of the school that I did this project for and a second more simply worded one for the target audience, the children of the school. I created two different surveys because I wanted to get feedback from general people around me as well as the target audience and both have given me similar feedback.

The general opinion of my work is positive. Everyone likes the characters, the colours and animations. The main criticisms seem to be:

-Some of the animations are a bit boring

-Some of the colours don’t look good

The ‘boring animations’ mostly refer to the R.E. Robin because his movement is too simple and not visually interesting.

The ‘colours that don’t look good’ mostly refers to the Geography Mole, who is a dark shade of blue that might be to dark, and the globe that he interacts with that is a simple brown like the plain globes that libraries or personal studies usually have instead of a colourful blue and green that are commonly found in schools and cartoons.

These were the most common criticisms that came from the surveys.

Despite these flaws in the characters the positive feedback far outweighs the negative with most people answering the final question: “If the characters were going to be done again, what should be changed?” with that they would not change anything.

After looking at the feedback given in the surveys that I distributed, I have been able to look at my work with more open eyes and see things more clearly.

Looking at this project as a whole I am quite pleased with my work. I believe that I have created a series of target appropriate characters that although are not perfect, as pointed out in the survey summarisation above, do fit the criteria that I set myself in my project proposal and contract with my client.

Based completely on my personal opinions. I know that what I have created is not perfect and has a number of flaws. The flaws that I see myself in my work are: The Rabbit characters thought bubble is drawn to sketchily, The Owl character changes appearance/costume too often in a small amount of time and should be made longer, The Mole characters colour is a bad shade of dark blue and should be a bit brighter, also the globe is very plain in colour and appears boring, The Duck character does not move at all despite the fact that he is playing an instrument. If I were to do the project again I would put more time into making the characters look more visually interesting through the use of better chosen colours and more interesting animated actions/movements.

The survey feedback confirms my opinions on some of the flaws of my work but not all of them which leads me to believe that that problems I see with the things I have created are either not as obvious to others, or others do not consider most of them flaws.

Despite the list of personal flaws I believe my work has, I believe that it is still a valuable piece of work and has many merits. I believe that the characters are colourful, visually interesting and are very suitable and appropriate to their target audience and as I mentioned earlier I am quite pleased with the work that I have created. This appears to be a shared opinion with the people who completed my surveys, some of who even praised the characters that I have taken issue with, referring them to as interesting and/or funny such as the ‘R.E. Robin’ and the ‘History Owl’.

Final Major Project Survey 2

Getting feedback from school children isn't the best way of getting the constructive feedback I need so I  created a second questionnaire to be filled out by the teachers of the school and other people that I showed the work to, such as my fellow students.

Final Major Project – Fronter Characters Questionnaire

1. What do you think of the animated characters?

2.  Are the characters appropriate for their target audience (school children)?

3. Are there any characters that do not seem appropriate and why?

4. Do the characters appear colourful and visually interesting?

5. Which animal(s) (if any) could be changed to look better visually?

6. What do you think of the animated actions of the characters?

7. Are there any animations that could be made better or changed to something more visually interesting?

      8. How much experience do you have with animating?

-Lots, I am an animation student or use lots of online tutorials ( ) 

-Some, I have just started an animation related course or follow online tutorials for fun ( )

-A bit, I sometimes do small animations for fun ( )

-Not much, only what I see in films ( )

-None, I don’t watch videos of any kind or am Amish ( )

Final Major Project Survey

Tp gain feedback on my work from the target audience of this project I created a questionnaire fo them to fill in. Because the target audience was school children it needed to be simple and easy for them to answer, and was created more to find out their opinion than anything else.

Final Major Project – Fronter Characters Questionnaire

1. Do you like the characters?

2.  Which character or characters is/are your favourite?

3. Why is that character or those characters your favourite?

4. Do you like the colours? Do they look good on their animal?

5. Which animals do you not like the colour(s) of?

6. Do you like the animations?

7. Are there any animations that you don’t like? Why?

8. If the characters were going to be done again, what would you change?

Final Major Project Completion

After finishing creating the animated GIF's of the woodland animals I used the instruction sheet provided to me by my client and uploaded them all the their respective pages.

Final Major Project Final Designs2

I have now created all 10 GIF's for the school's website:

Final Major Project Final Designs

After showing my client the new designs I was given the go ahead to create the characters. I was also given an instruction sheet on how to embed the GIF's to the appropriate pages when they were finished.
Here are the GIF's I have created so far:

Woodland Animals - Animating

I have begun creating the woodland animals in Photoshop and animating them in Flash.

Animated GIF Storyboard

This is the storyboard example of what the animations would look like when they're on the website.

Woodland Animal Designs2.5

These are the digital versions of the woodland animal designs. Colour and subject specific props will be added.

Woodland Animal Designs2

After the feedback I got from the last client meeting I created these designs for the animals.

I then created the subject specific specific versions of each of them that I will turn into animated GIF's or short videos.

 

Woodland Animals Designs

After my first meeting with my client I created three character designs to get an idea of what the client would like.

The first was to get an idea of what colours look the best and most appeal to the children. From this I learned that the children preffer the brighter vibrant colours such as the red, yellow, blue and orange.

The second was to see if the client preffered the characters with or without props. Turns out they do.

The third design was to see if the client preffered the appearence of an anthropomorphic or realistic character. Despite my expectation the client preffered the idea of the animalistic appearence for the characters.

Woodland Animals Research

For this project I have done some research into the appearence of woodland animals both real and cartoon, animalstic and anthropomorphic.

Final Major Project Project

After meeting with my chosen client and discussing with them the kind of things they would want. We have agreed that I will create a series of characters based on woodland animals, such as foxes, badgers, rabbits etc... Which will be put onto their school website on the student accessible section named Fronter, each character will represent a different school subject and be embedded into it's related webpage.

FMP - Final Client Choice

I have decided to choose Kirklington Primary School as my client for this project. This is mostly because Ampetronic was going through a busy period in their work and did not have time to meet and talk with me about this project. But I am not unhappy about this as any project I would have had to do for Ampetronic might have become overwhelming due to the projects for other units whereas the project for Kirklington Primary School can be reasonably simple and will hopefully be more fun.

FMP - Client Choices2

After meeting with representetives from both possible clients I have been given an idea of what I can do for each of them and the quality of which they need to be.

The Ampetronic client is mostly interested in a 3D video demonstration of how their products work, this will include creating their product, a layout for it to go into e.g. a room or building, and people to be using it. This makes the project seem very large and possibly quite difficult as I have never created organic models that can be realisticaly animated e.g. humans. But I am quite interested to see if I can do it.

The Primary school client is very interested in the idea of creating a character or series of characters for the children to be possibly put on the school website. This project seems quite simple but with a good amount of creativity and so seems more fun and less daunting than the Ampetronic project, however this client is less likely to get my work spread around and noticed by any companies in the animation industry or any other industry.

FMP - Client Choices

For my final major project there are two main clients that I could go with.

The first and prefferable is Ampetronic, a company that creates and instals audio induction loops and hearing aid loops. This is the prefferable choice because it is a large specialised company that is one of the leading companies in its field and so if my work is used by them it might be spread through that indistry and may branch out into others.
For this client I could create animated advertisements, I could create a new logo design, I could create a saftey video or a demonstration video of their product.

My second choice is a local primary school in Kirklington ear to where I live. The main advantage I can think of for this choice over the above is that I can be more creative in what I create because the project will need to be appropriate and fun for children.
For this client I could create a school mascot/logo character or design a new classroom layout.