While animation might be the most open of time-based media forms, I also found it to be the most challenging. I found it to be this way because of both the freedom I was afforded and my incapability with using Flash.
It is an exciting form, for sure, because I could blend real life photographs with animated vector-based figures that I created. This allowed for a larger canvas for me to work from to express certain ideas and depict certain images I would not be able to in a basic straight-up filmmaking assignment (like the last one we did).
I believe that my project was too ambitious for its own good, and I was not able to achieve everything I wanted to. Using and adapting the imagery and tone from a poem was incredibly difficult, and I surely did not want to misrepresent one of my favorite literary artists of the twentieth century.
All of this ambition was crushed under my inability to use Flash, or moreover my poor ability with using Flash. Unfortunately I found Professor Miranda’s lectures a bit confusing and too fast-paced for a beginner of Flash (like me). He is obviously very skilled at using it, and it clearly showed, but I found it hard to follow at times and I also found the project he was working on too complicated compared to the ones we would be making in our labs.
I have always appreciated all kinds of animation, and working on this project has increased my admiration for animation makers. As a filmmaker (or at least a filmmaker in my head), I see animation as a valid standalone art and also as an art that I would think of using in a project one day (after much mastery of Flash and other animation programs, obviously).
