Rockall's Cat Lady music video
This music video was the first group project I've took part in, and it was also the first animation that required some networking such as getting Rockall's permission to make an animation based on one of their supplied tracks which my college provided. This brief was to make a music video which not only demonstrates teamwork and visualisation but to represent the brand of the band. The song is about a cat lady who goes about her day, being obsessed with cats as well as being a fan of Paul of Grady too, this music video is to showcase both her daily life and her interest in both cats and Paul o Grady, creating an animation while possessing a straight forward identity, also has elements of humour and a sense of oddness to it, we were either representing the lyrics, or forming visuals alongside the instrumental sections.
This animation was once again created using After Effects and Illustrator, not only done by me but two other people too, (who you can see in the credits of the music video, those people also continue to generate animated work, and I would like to share the credit with them, just like how I would like to share the credit within my other group work, such as the animations you see more of as you go through this site, and even for briefs in the future too). I did a good portion of the animation such as the design of the characters, generating the settings, applying various techniques and transitions followed by putting the scenes together along with implementing the soundtrack. The others helped with the credits, text animation and creating some other assets for the setting. Overall, this animation consists of generating large settings, glowing effects, a better use of the puppet tool and a collection of transitions which were not only new to me but they were executed well enough in my opinion.
Overall, this animation I do like outside of a couple of inferior qualities, the feedback has stated there were areas of animation to improve on such as the messy puppet tool work for when applying them to the Cat Lady and Paul o Grady, this I agree with, also when Paul O Grady picks up the dog, the dog should be in front of Paul, not behind him. However, as the first group animation, it was not only an experience which was successful but it did help me understand group work more and it helped me realise what to do better for when doing other group projects; not to mention as I did the most within this animation compared to the other two people, it has educated myself to be more of a leader and a group member that has more priorities compared to the others, which are traits I would like to improve in future. While I am more of an independent worker, not only is teamworking experience beneficial for me, but I want to expand on it for the good of my future, and this project was the first stepping stone towards this. The other aspects in the animation I did like such as expanding upon the simplistic identity when it came to the design of the characters and settings, a good use of glowing effects, successful transitions and the humour while dated was funny back then, even when showing this to others, it did make them laugh, especially the scene in the countryside. To conclude, because of this animation involving other people, gaining a small fanbase at first and even being some of my acquittances favourite animation of mine, it still stands as one of my most viewed animation yet.
This was given one to two months to complete, this was because it was one of those animations where the time given was for both the planning and production. Other college animations had two briefs, one for the planning and one for the animation itself, making them both marked independently while adding to the module grade, this was the first college animation where you had to make time for planning and for when making the final animation. Me and the group only spent the first two weeks to generate the planning material (and other organisational areas like contacting Rockall themselves). The rest of the time was used to make the animation, use the first few days to make the assets (while other aspects were generated like the title intro in the meantime), and then the following weeks is where we started to put everything together like the assets within the correct scenes, the soundtrack, some After Effects techniques and then doing the final render a couple of days before the deadline. From my experience, it is worthwhile to perform a render that gets given time before the deadline, due to rendering often taking a while or if there are any errors that occur, this is a very important piece of advice for when making your own work.