[Commission] The Kangaroo Animation

This project was given to us as work experience, it wasn't mandatory but was said to "look good on a CV", the client wanted people experienced in animation to work with him, so myself, Will Padgett and Anthony Price took the work. This work was not paid and we was offering our services to him for free, however we did not finish the project as we all quit halfway through the animating process for our reasons. Though we gave him what we had done and told him he can finish the rest himself. Below is the outcome:

As you can see, the animation looks very incomplete and more like an animatic, we were told to tween the animation with models, he provided us with a kangaroo hop cycle (Though I recently found a tutorial which I think he may have used to create the kangaroo with located here) and then we were to animate the other models ourselves, I created the wallaby and the rest of the team created the other animals. The main reason why it turned out so bad was the fact that he had me, Anthony and Will animating different scenes, and not giving us separate roles. Each of us animate very differently, giving off a very look to the animation, to fix this he should have given us roles such as Lead animator, secondary animator, clean up animator ect.

The reason behind us quitting was because of the lack of information given at each meeting, the poor way we were treated in the meeting and because he was telling us to do things that we didn't how how to or felt uncomfortable doing. In the first meeting he gave us a shot list and a shot to name list, using these he'd choose 3 out of our lists for us to animate, however it seems like he tried to evenly give us a bit to animate in each scene each, which would and did cause continuity errors. Because of this we were abit uneasy on how it'd end up and we weren't feeling it, so we each discussed leaving the team, however we decided to stick to it a while longer until we finished the animation. During the last few weeks of us being there though, our client started to treat us incredibly rudely, telling us to do most of the scenes again, insulting us, ordering us around and then having the cheek to tell us we have to give him £25 each so we can pay for an after party to show off the animation. Because of these reasons we sent him an email and told him he can do it himself, we gave him all the scenes, the models and the resources he'd need to finish it off, we just wanted nothing to do with it.

The animation is roughly 3:16 minutes long, and took us from the end of January until we quit in April to do half the scenes. We could have done the animation alot faster and with little hassle if it was alot more organised. Considering the animation was almost all tweened, me, Anthony and Will could have done the animation together in roughly a month. We weren't given a script of any kind, we only received instructions on what to animate at each given time, the shot list could be considered a script however even from that I didn't know what was going on in the animation until I actually watched the finished thing.

Overall I did take away something from this experience, the knowledge on when to quit a team when we are treated as badly as we were. I didn't gain any animation experience, however I did gain the experience of what it is like to work under a bad client. No client should as for money from people he came to for help, insult us and give us little to no information about what he wants doing, then blame it on us when we haven't done what he wants, especially when we were doing it out of the goodness of out hearts.