Animation Anguish

What a process! At first I was very scared of animation because I thought it would be very high tech and complicated with programming language. Then, I downloaded Alice and received a little bit of hope. Alice seemed to be user friendly by implementing drag and drop features instead of writing codes. As I watched the tutorials, I began thinking "Ok, I can do this! Animation doesn't seem to be that hard." Right after I told myself this, I accidentally moved a method to the wrong place in the tutorial and it got on to me telling me that I wasn't following directions carefully. This should have been my sign of things to come.

I began with a simple idea of creating a food chain because this is what we are studying in science right now in my class. I did enjoy the ability to easily drag actions into the world and constantly preview and tweak it. I did like how Alice provided the graphic animals for me to use in my world. Even though they did not have a huge variety of animals available, they had enough so that I could get the point across. I also like how they had numerous of actions for each object added to the world already programmed. I played with Alice for numerous hours and constructed my basic plot and animation actions. I became stuck with I tried to add my name into the final frame of the video. Once I added the words, they remained in the middle of my animation. Several hours later, I finally became so frustrated with the 3D text and camera angles that I decided to try a new animation software and see if I had any better luck.

I had played around with Kerpoof at school before so I decided to try out its' movie/animation feature. Kerpoof was also a drag and drop format. I was able to quickly insert characters and objects, add animation, create special effects, and add a final slide. I really liked how Kerpoof gave the option of adding music to different parts of the animation. I did find a few drawbacks to using Kerpoof. First, I did not like that I could not open all of their graphics to select the ones that I wanted to use. I had to continually click on the sidebar until a graphic that I could use appeared. Also, I didn't like that I cannot save the file to my computer as a movie to play back. The only was to share the file is by sending a link to the movie on the Kerpoof website.

Ultimately, I decided to go back to my almost finished Alice animation and try it again with a new day and a clear mind. By this time I had also received some great help from classmates on how to move the 3D text around in the world so that it is not right in the middle of my animation. It worked!!! YEA!!! I almost had a heart attack when my computer froze up when I was trying to save the world right after I got the text to work with me. I actually had Alice slow my computer down quite a bit when it was open and other programs were running. Last, I just had to tweak some of the timing to shorten the length and add some details to make it more interesting.

I learned a lot about animation through this process, like how to manipulate actions into what you want them to be, but I think that the most important thing I learned, was that animation is definitely not in my future.