I have already made an animation like this a year ago, but I decided I wanted to improve it. Since then I have been given a new camera, and I’ve learnt so much about film making so I knew I would be able to do a much better job compared to last time.
Original animation:
The first thing to figure out was lighting. I tend to always use a natural light source such as a window, but they can cause inconsistent lighting due to the weather changing. If you watch my original video of this, the high number of lighting changes really stands out, which is the reason I wanted to tackle this issue the most. After completing many animations in my bedroom using my white desk, I have concluded that this is the best place. The main light source is to the right of the camera. To help level it out, I use the light directly above my desk. This also helps with adding more light into the scene.
Quality was hard to get right in the old video. I’m pretty sure the toast was out of focus the entire time which wasn’t very impressive. But what I found was the overall sharpness and quality of the video was not very good. In order to fix this I found the best settings to work with that would help the animation look much clearer. This time around I actually made sure that the subject was in focus as I thought that would be a good start as well.
While editing, I added layers of multiple sounds as opposed to just one. This would deliver the illusion of a collection of children instead of a few. A mixture of sounds also adds a wide range of voices, so everyone sounds slightly different.
Here is the improved version:
