Week 12! Final Review!

The Final Animation (Without Sound)

Overall, I'm really happy with how it all turned out. As I edited it together in premier pro I took out quite a chunk of scene one and two, and a small bit from scene 3 at the end.

After all this I've noticed the way the tie fighter in scene 3 slows as it nearly hits the other tie fighter. That does annoy me every time I watch the video now but it's too late to change it.

The good parts

• Scene Two's overall feel of being very ominous and forboding. I feel that I really hit that mark. On that scene.
• The crosshair in scene 3 I really love, and the camera angle from inside the cockpit. I'm glad I deviated from my plan to make that scene as it was a lot of work to have all the moving pieces come together, and it was also my first time animating the laser shots.
• That I made too much, making too much and having the part-luxury and part-tough-decision to cut parts out to bring it down to 30 seconds was great. It was a lot easier to cut parts out than it would be to make more afterwards.
• Scene 4's explosion and camera angle. It really creates an epic feel of 'cool guys don't look at explosions'
• The exhaust lights, I just really love the look of them. It may be difficult to notice but in scene 3 the lights flare up just as the lambda shuttle kicks into a higher gear and shoots off to safety.
• Figuring out the visibility track so the lasers and ships could disappear. While it didn't help for scene three's ships as Max kept crashing for that, it worked perfectly for Scene 4's ships and lasers.

The improvements and bad parts plus what I learned from them

• As I mentioned above, the Tie Fighter in scene three really bugs me and I wish I had time to change it. 
• Scene 1, it doesn't feel as full of wonder or give the vast feel it should when it's together with all the other scenes. I think if I had remade this Scene I would make the camera's arc a lot longer out to the side, so you really get that feeling of the vastness of space. 
• The crosshair in scene 3. I had no good ideas on how to get rid of the crosshair once the shots were fired and everything started to happen, so it just seems to sit there in the middle and obscure the action. I really feel as though there could be simple solution to that but I can't visualise it.
• Number of Tie Fighters. When doing the original storyboard I think I underestimated how long a scene would take, especially while having to have it slow enough for the viewer to see whats going on. I think I could have minimised it to 3 tie fighters if I had enough time to go back and edit everything.
• Positions of tie fighters when transitioning from scene 3 to 4. If I again had some more time and more patience with 3DS Max's crashes I would have attempted to have it line up properly for a more seamless transition. 
• I feel like Scene 3 really has no feeling to it, and it might be slightly boring but while building it I imagined it to be a lot better. It may just be me, but while I'm still really proud of it as a collection of effects and hard work, I really don't think it hits the mark on how exciting it should be, compared to how long the scene actually is. Perhaps if I remade it, I'd have the X-Wing fire really quickly at first, and then swoop around a bit more, since the cause may be that the X-Wing is fairly static and it just sits there and watches.
• After watching the finished project I would have liked to have some planets etc. in the background, but by that point it was simply too late. I should have made a simple version of my final animation, perhaps with just grey blocks first to see the space I used.