Critic-tique...ing...myself - Vessel

This was really my first time melding animation with a video. This was also my first time delving into Adobe After Effects, where the bulk of my sluggishness in the project came from. The learning process always take a longer time with me because mastering the details in a program is where my speed usually comes from, so I take my time learning these small nuances. With this animation project, the figuring out/thinking part of my brain overshadowed the creativity in this project. Just trying to adhere the entire project together using the programs became the main goal.

Critique of the Video
I was able to do what I intended to do in my blueprint for the project, which was to make a fish with a video of an eye, create a zooming out scene from the eye to the environment, make the fish jump from water to land, create a panning sequence of the animated plant, and end it with the blinking eye. I think the whole piece can be taken lightheartedly from the oddity of the piece. I was thinking of adding music to the end, but I felt the sound of the waves and the video of the wave behind the eye added a right atmosphere to the project.

Now that the positive is out of the way, time to tear into myself
-The pacing, especially in the introduction with the zoomed-in eye, needed to longer scene and the viewer should be introduced slowly into the watery environment.
-The animation, is below my intended capabilities. If I could get my technical difficulties out of the way and have more time for this, that fish would be of something almost surrealistic. Same goes for the plant animation, the plant would be a vine that slowly twirls as it grows from the ground, not a bunch of slashes.
-The sounds of the plant growing cut off with the last orange branch being made and should have another sound for creation of the head, or eye of the plant.
-I also enjoyed the part where I walk onto the scene on the beach looking like a human lego figure with my especially square bulbous head that day.

I did learn critical details from making this project.
-To create a transparent background from PS to AE. Hide the background and when done with the animation, render the video and save it as an animation compression, not H.264 for this will create a black background when transferred; this was a lot of frustration figuring it out.
-Compositions and Nesting is a great way to organize scenes in AE. You also have to finish rendering a composition before you add it with another composition, under a composition.
-Rendering can take a long time so shortening a composition length helps in making it go faster. Having a strong and capable computer with processing power also helps. I'm going to make a new computer build specifically for rendering and 3d animation this summer.
-You can pan and zoom in your video using the camera layer and null object by linking them together and making your layers 3d.
-Always save...to your own hard drive.
-Make animation in Flash in the future, compile video in After Effects, Finishing touches with sound in Final Cut Pro.

This project laid the rough foundations for future projects for me.