3. Initial Problems –
Practical/Technical
Problem How Ill Solve It
My iPad/ computer breaks. If my computer/iPad breaks I lose my work, this will be detrimental to
my grade and will ultimately mean I fail the course which would not be
a good at all. There isn't a lot that I will be able to do in this situation,
but to combat it before it happens, I'm going to get a USB drive and put
all my work onto it so if anything like this happens or if OneDrive and
my iPad get wiped ill have all work and I won't have to worry about it all
getting lost.
I'm unable to get into college. If this happens, I'm quite lucky in the fact that it won't affect me as I can
work effectively from home, as long as I have my iPad and a computer, I
can do my work so this isn't a massive worry for me. I will try my best to
get into college as much as possible as it helps keep me motivated
versus when I'm at home I find too hard to concentrate when there's a
lot of distractions.
I delete my Wix website, or something happens that
means I can't 'access it anymore
If this happens, I will hopefully already have all the work on SlideShare
where I'll be able to create a new website and reupload all the work,
although this is very unlikely to happen, I think it something I need to
think about because it's not an impossible thing and there are chances
of it happening. If its just that fact that the site isn't working, I'll get as
much work done as I can and try the next day.
SlideShare isn't working and I can't upload work. If this happens which has happened in the past, I'll take any work and
transfer it on a google document for example for a PowerPoint ill copy
and paste each slide on a google slides document and then upload it
onto my website from there. Like I said this has happened before during
the Factual project and meant I couldn’t upload work to get feedback
on it which is a pivotal part of the progression of the project. Had I
known that google documents was a thing I probably wouldn’t have to
delay my work.
I get behind on work. If this happens which it inevitably will as I've given myself a lot work to
do, I'm going to keep going with my schedule so I can keep on task and
not get behind on all my work and catch up over weekends and over
easter half term. This is because I don’t want to get behind to a point
where I can't catch up at all. I think this is probably the most efficient
way to work and will keep me on track to finish the project.
4. Initial Problems –
Theoretical/Creative
Problem How Ill Solve It
The app I'm using doesn’t work. If this happens it will pause my work which isn't good as we only have a 5
weeks for production, I haven't had any issues yet and hopefully I won't
when it comes to production. There isn't much I can do if this happens if
I'm being honest, there aren't another apps that really compare to
Procreate and I'll be in trouble if it breaks. If it really comes down, do it, I
will research some other apps that are similar to Procreate and use that
until the issues get resolved.
I lose my iPad/Apple pen If this happens it will be end of the project because if I lose the iPad all the
work goes with it, and I won't be able to redo it. Fortunately, there is
Find My iPhone which might help with finding it, other than that I'll have
to make sure I do constant uploads to icloud so I don’t lose any work and
if it comes down to it put it on a new iPad. If I lose the pen, it will put a
hold on my work, put again its findable and I will be able to get a new one
it will just be a bit expensive but then again, it’s the difference between
getting into university and not so £100 isn't really that much when you
look at it like that.
Accidently deleting work The same goes for this as for what I said for if I lose my iPad, If I want to
avoid losing work as much as possible, so not only am I going to back up
my iPad as much as possible on the iCloud, but I'm also going to send
copies to my PC so I can put them on a USB drive. This will make sure all
my work is safe and ill have 2 copies of the work meaning it will be hard to
lose it.
Not bring my charger to college/ leaving my iPad on a low battery
without realising.
This is a bit more of a trivial problem that I've learnt over time to
overcome, during the first year I would charge my iPad at home and then
bring it college and not bring the charger which would ultimately mean
my iPad would die during the final period when I was nearly finished with
work. I don’t want this happen again and I am already taking steps to
prevent this by always having my charger in my bag as I don’t use my iPad
outside of college so there's no point in taking it out of my bag.
Animation/ my own ability Over the 2 years I've been at college I've mostly focused on animation;
over this time, I'd say I've improved quite a lot from what I was doing in
the first year. Despite this I'm still not amazing at it and I need a few
pointers here and there so, during my production research I outlined how
I was going to advance my skills to cater to this project. I planned on doing
experiments for each aspect of the planned animations that I wasn’t
familiar with for example, a simple punching motion which will be how
the character fights. I decided to do this so I could be more familiar with
what I was doing and so that I wasn’t going into the project blind. This will
be done on my iPad and then uploaded onto this PowerPoint.
5. Problem Solving - Graphic Issues
So as my project is all done from an iPad unfortunately there are 4 ways I could export my project, animated
GIF, animated PNG, animated MP4 and animated HVEC and until recently, I realised that when I exported
the product, it was blurry and look awful. I tried all 4 numerous times to try and get it to work to no avail.
This left me really worried and scared that my whole project and all the time id spent animating was going
to go to waste and most importantly, I wasn’t going to get the grade I needed to get into university. After a
friend asked me how I was going to export it I said I had no idea and he suggested I try screen recording it.
At this time, I didn’t know you could just screen record through the iPad itself, so I downloaded an app and
low and behold it looked just as awful as when id tried to export it earlier. I was honestly dumbfounded and
lost for what to do, but lucky id realised that the app used an interface to screen record that looked like it
was actually built into the iPad, so I looked up how to screen record on an iPad on the internet and found
how you could actually screen record without a third-party. I got up procreate and tried screen
recording one of my experiments and it worked perfectly thankfully. It was slightly blurry but was nothing
like the other recordings. I think if that hadn't had worked, I would've had to try and do some editing magic
to make it look good and I don’t know how possible that would've been if I'm honest. Know all I have to do
is crop and edit the footage I have from the screen recordings, add music over the top and upload it to
YouTube. Overall, I think I should've paid more attention to the fact that this would happen because, I when
I'd tried to export my experiments it did exactly what I'd said earlier, it was blurry and looked awful, and I
put it one side thinking ill fix it when it comes time to upload it. That was an incredibly stupid decision that
added unnecessary stress on top of everything else I have to stress about with the project. So, for the future
I need to plan ahead more and not ignore important problems early on.
8. Experiments
When it comes to my experiments, I want to take most of my inspiration from Stardew Valley, the
art styles will be similar, and I think it would be a good idea to study how the characters from the
game move and use it in my own work. I other than that I think the best thing to do would be to
look back my production research and use what I have there to create my experiments, it’s a good
place to start from at least and from I've seen I think I can transfer the animation into my own style
and make it fit with my project. To start I going to look at the running cycle, I kind of know what I'm
doing here but think it would be good to just refresh my memory. From there I'm going to animate
the jumping animation and then the fighting stance.
I've chosen to do these for my experiments as these are the main components of the animation
and know what I'm doing with everything else animation wise, other things like backgrounds
I'm just going to look up references and I don’t see any point in doing drawing experiments as I have
experience. If I do come to something that I don’t know how to animate ill either use my general
knowledge on how thing move or look up reference images and tutorials.
Unfortunately, I'm not able to upload the full animation to the PowerPoint so I have left links to
each of the animation on the corresponding page.
9. Experiments – Jumping Animation
https://youtu.be/KFmKJef1qzQ
So, to create the jumping sequence I referred back to my production PowerPoint and looked at the
video I linked. From there I opened procreate on my iPad and to make sure I got all the frames
correct I slowed down the playback on the video to 0.25, paused it on the frames that I needed to
copy and drew them out in the design of Ari. I did this for each of the frames and it took me around
20-30 minutes. I was kind of tricky to get the proportions right, I kept having to refer to past image
to make sure everything looked ok and lined up right. It was quite difficult having to draw each
frame , but I was glad to have the video to refer back to when I need it. I also didn’t want her to end
up with a massive head in one frame or a leg longer in another. In the video the person the guy's
animating doesn’t have hair and that's something I had to think about, her hair wouldn’t just stay in
one place. To achieve this, I looked at each frame and depending on where she was at that moment,
I'd make her hair be in a different place.
Overall, I liked doing this experiment, it was difficult to draw everything in line and in proportion, I
think there was an instance where id drawn wrong and it meant it had to redraw the whole image
again, it didn’t cost that much of my time by it was an inconvenience. But other than that, I'm really
happy with how it came it out and am quite shocked that it looks as good as it does.
10. Experiments – Fighting Stance
https://youtu.be/WnBlBAMwKp8
For this experiment I used what I had researched in my production research as I had done for the
previous experiment. I started by opening Procreate on my iPad, duplicating a canvas, deleting what was
there and then finally bringing in Ari for reference, then so I knew what I was doing I brought up the slide
of my production research that contained the information of how to animate the animation. From there I
started drawing what I saw in the research in the art style I've chosen, I had to keep referring back to
keyframes id taken from the video to make sure I was on track. There was a moment where I did mess up
her leg in the 3rd frame, it was too similar to the previous one, so I had to go through and edit it around 3
times before I was happy with the result. I also had a similar issue with their arms in this frame, they
again, were too like the ones in the last frames ( too low down and her didn’t look liked they'd moved at
all), they didn’t take as long to fix but it was an inconvenience nether the less. The last frame was pretty
seamless didn’t take long to do at all. Then to make it flow, I moved the frames, so they matched up with
the movement of the character.
Overall I'm not really happy with how it came out it looks kind of jolty and doesn’t flow as well as id like,
unfortunately there wasn’t any other tutorials that I felt fit what I needed. Despite this I think it’s a good
attempt and shows that it something that can be built upon in the future.
11. Experiments - Running Cycle
https://youtube.com/shorts/oVoUPII0Qn8?feature=share
As I've done this before, I had I a good idea of what I was doing, a I had done for the previous two
experiments I looked back at my production research and referenced what I had there. I ended up
using the first image for my reference as that one looked like it would work best for me. I began by
pasting in the original art for Ari onto the canvas as I have done in the past and went from there. I
followed what was in the reference images adding new frames as I went and also moving them to
correct spot so I wouldn’t get confused and so it saved me doing it afterwards. I did this until I
reached the point where I could duplicate the images to have a looping animation. I didn’t have any
major troubles with it, however when I rewatched it few times something seemed extremely off
about it, I referred back to the images and tried to figure out what was wrong to unfortunately no
avail, it might have been because I'd looked at it so many times that it just looked off.
Overall, I'm happy with the outcome of this animation, it looks good to other people so I'm going to
be using it in my final piece. I might not use it a lot due to the variation of movements ill need for
the animation but its still and integral part of the process and I'm glad I made the time to be able to
go over it again.
