Unit 37 Assignment 2 – 2D Animation Production

Planning
Title
Tanks: A Quick Duel

The Medium
The medium or software, I will be using in the
creation of my animation is Adobe Animate which is
widely well known and used software for animation.
This software is widely used due to its flexibility and
multiple features which, if you wish too and have
enough experience, allow you to create very in-
depth animations.

Running Time
During planning for my animation, the specification stated that the animation had to be
between 14 - 60 seconds. With this in mind, I decided that I would create a short, no longer
than 30 seconds. As it currently stands, my animation is 25 seconds in length, which works
with what I intended.

Description
The animated short I am creating was a little scenario though up in my head whilst I was
playing games. It takes place in late 1945 during
the closing moths of the second world war and
depicts the main character, an American
M4A3E8 Sherman medium tank having a tank
duel with a German heavy tank, the
panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. H commonly
called the Tiger 1. The animation depicts a quick
and tense battle the two tanks where every
second counts for the survival of each crew.
Target Audience
There were many factors that went into the decision making for this animation and one big
one would be who this animation was aimed. I decided that my animation would be aimed
at teens or older who play video games based on tanks or just enjoy seeing tanks battle. I
came to this decision after thinking of what type of people enjoy seeing tanks battle and its
usually gamers and as there are a lot of teenage/adult gamers, I thought it would be the right
audience.

Design

Sherman Tank

The design on the left is for the main character of the animation, the M4A3E8 Sherman. The
tank will be coloured in with white and will be outlined with black. This careint of the
Sherman is around 9.02ft (2.75m) tall, had a width of 9.51ft (2.90m), a length of 24.61ft
(7.50m) and weighs around 33 metric tons. The tank is made of rolled homoagouns armour
for the hull and a mix of both rolled and cast homogenous armour on the turret, while the
barrel is made of gun steel. The gun has a calibre of 76mm and mainly fires armour piercing
rounds, high explosive rounds and armour piercing capped ballistic capped (APCBC) rounds.
The round used in the animation will be the APCBC round.
Tiger Tank
This
design is
for the
main
enemy
that will
be
fighting
the main

character in the animation, the Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. H. It like the Sherman will be
coloured white with black outlines. This German heavy tank is probably one of the most
discussed tank of world war two due to how effective it was when it was first fielded by the
Germans. It was 3m (9.10ft) tall, 3.56m (11.8ft) wide and 6.316m (20,8ft) in length. The tank
weighed 57 tonnes due to the amount of armour it had. The front plate of the tank had
100mm of rolled homogenous armour with the side being 80mm thick and 60mm thick
behind the tracks. Overall the tank was very well armoured however it could be defeated
from the side by the Sherman’s 76mm gun and from the front if the Sherman was close
enough. For this reason, the Tiger will be side on to the Sherman to add more realist
elements to the animation as the Sherman could easily take it down like that.

76mm APCBC round

This is the 76mm round
fired from the Sherman in
the animation. As you can
see, I have drawn the
round from a few different
angles to show how the
round would look with the
propellant that is usually
attached to it. As the
animation will follow the
round inflight from behind,
the furthest right drawing
is what the round will look
like in the animation. The
round is an Armour Piercing Capped Ballistic Capped (APCBC) with explosive filler can
penetrate up to 124mm of penetration at 100m.
 Storyboard
Frame 1
Here is the first frame scene of my
storyboard. It depicts an M4A3E8 Sherman
driving down a road. In the animation, the
Sherman will be driving down this road for
around ten seconds. Trees will be animated
on the sides of the road to help give the
illusion of movement. Audio of a tank driving
will also be added to help with the
immersion of the scene.

Frame 2
As the Sherman will be driving down the
road, an explosion will happen in front of it.
This explosion will be from the Tiger tank
that will be serving as the main enemy of
this animation. After the explosion, the tank
will come to a halt with a sound effect of a
tank breaking. When the tank stops, the
camera will fade to black.

Frame 3
In the third frame shown on the left, the
camera has faded back into what the viewer
will see as the Sherman’s scope optics. The
optics will then rotate to find the Tiger tank
on the right of the Sherman and will
continue to rotate until the crosshair is over
the tiger tank.
Frame 4
This fourth scene is just after the Sherman
tank has located the Tiger tank and cuts to
an external view of the Sherman as it is
about to fire. It will stay on this view as the
Sherman fires and once it has fired the
camera will again cut. These cuts are in the
animation to help speed it up and make
the pacing faster as it is meant to depict
how quick and engagement can happen.

Frame 5
This next scene starts by showing the
Sherman’s 76mm shell flying towards the
side of the Tiger tank. The camera will
continue to follow the shell as it travels
towards the tiger tank and when then
show gets close enough, the camera will
fade to black. This is to show the viewer
that the tank hit the shell without
animating the impact as I simply won’t
have enough time to do so.

Frame 6
In the sixth scene, the Sherman’s shell has
impacted the tank and the camera fades
back to the back of a tiger which is now
burning. As this is the last scene of the
animation, the tank will burn for five or
more second and then fade to black to
indicate that the animation has ended.
Original storyboard

Audience response
Question 1
The first question I asked
was if the person had seen
my animation. I did this of
course to know whether
this person’s opinion is valid
for the rest of the survey. If
they haven’t seen the
animation, then their
feedback won’t be of use.
As you can see from the
results, all the people who
took the survey have seen
the animation.
Question 2
The next question
asked was regarding
the length of the
animation. Five
options were given
from too short to too
long for the person to
answer. As we can see
looking at the
screenshot to the left,
80% of users said that
the animation could
be longer and 20% said that it was the right length. This means that any potential
improvements made to the animation should focus on making it a bit longer.
In my opinion, I would say that the animation could do with an extra five seconds just to bring
it up to a total of thirty seconds for the runtime. However, as it currently stands, it would not
be a massive priority to extend the runtime of the animation.

Question 3
The third question
asked was whether
the animation was
smooth or not.
Looking at the results,
100% of the users said
that the animation
was smooth. Since no
one said that the
animation was
unsmooth, no improvements should be needed in terms of making the animation smoother.
I would have to disagree with this as I believe that the animation was not as smooth as I hoped
it would be. While some parts of the animation were very smooth, others weren’t as smooth,
this was due to the fact that I was pressed for time when creating this animation.
Question 4
The next question
asked was about the
quality of the audio in
my animation. As we
can see from looking at
the results, all of the
feedback was positive.
With 40% of users
saying that it was
neither good or bad,
another 40% saying the
audio was high quality
and 20% of users saying that the audio was very high quality. While I am pleased with this, I
believe that in the future it would be possible to raise the percentage of users who said the
audio was high quality to around 50% or more.
I think that it is important to have high quality audio that fits with the animation as 50% of
the experience is made up from hearing the audio in the animation. For this reason, I tried
hard to make sure that the audio was of high quality and I believe it was. And from the
feedback given, it would seem the majority of people agree with me.

Question 5
The fifth question was
about the video quality
on the animation, this
was of course talking
about resolution and
such. Looking at the
feedback on the left we
can see that the
majority of users found
the video quality to be
average. while the
other users either
found it to be high quality or very high quality. This is a good thing as the animation was in
1080p resolution which is pretty much the standard resolution so when the majority of people
say that the animation was “neither high nor low quality” it means that the animation was
the average expected quality.
I believe that the quality of the animation was average as that is what I was going for and for
that reason I would have to agree with the majority of the user feedback.
Question 6
The sixth question
asked was if the
audio synced up with
the animation. In the
survey, 100% of
users stated that the
audio did in fact sync
up with the
animation. This is
excellent to see as it
means I have done a good job with the audio along with the fact that I won’t have to go
through the animation to find parts where the audio is out of sync.
When implementing the audio, I made sure that it was in sync with the animation otherwise
I would have been displeased. For this reason, I believe that the audio was in fact in sync with
the animation and the results from the survey pretty much confirm that.

Question 7
The seventh
question asks users
whether the
animation looked
professional.
Looking at the
results from the
survey we can see
that all the users
agreed that the animation looked professional.
I would have to disagree with the majority of people as I believe that while the animation
looked fairly professional, it was fairly rushed due to the time constraint and lack of
experience.
Question 8
The eight and
final questions
asks the viewers if
they would
recommend any
improvements for
the animation, on
the left are five of
the comments
left by the
viewers. Three
out of the five
reviews said that
the animation
was fine in it’s
current state and
had no
recommendation while the fourth one stated that the animation was fine and that any
improvements would be personal changes with the animation. The fifth review
recommended that adding some more detail and additional animations could help. I would
have to agree with the fifth one the most as I would’ve liked to add way more things to the
animation, however, due to a lack of time, I could not. Additionally, adding more animations
would indeed assist in making the runtime of the animation longer.

Review
Overall, I am somewhat pleased with the end result of my 2D animation as it’s not perfect,
but after looking at the reviews, people seem to like it. I think that I have made a decent
quality animation which is quick and enjoyable to watch, and at the end of the day, that is
what I was aiming to create. I still believe that the animation could use some additional
work to help make it look and feel more professional but as it stands, I am happy with the
result. As for the audio on the animation, I feel as if I did a good job syncing it up with the
animation which defiantly could’ve given the animation more of a professional feel. Most of
my dislikes of the animation come from me not having enough time to improve on certain
aspects, however, were I given extra time on the animation I could definitely bring it to a
point in which I am more pleased with it. If given said additional time, here are some of the
improvements I’d make:

• Add more detail and colour to the scenes

• Add additional audio to some scenes
• Extend the finale scene to bump up the runtime of the animation
Making these changes would defiantly improve the animation making it in my opinion,
worthier of the praise it has received. Overall, I’d give my animation a rating of 7/10 as there
are few issues which I will list now:

• Lack if smoke or explosion when tank fires

• First tank shell impact doesn’t really indicate that a tank shell was fired
• No audio exists to indicate that the Sherman’s tank shell has hit the Tiger in the
fading to black.
However, I believe that my 2D animation has me the target audience criteria that I set
during the initial stages of planning. The animation is suitable for teen/adult gamers or tank
enthusiasts and the animation is no longer than thirty seconds so that people won’t get
bored watching as it gets straight into the action. For these reasons, along with all the
positive feedback received from my survey on the viewers of the animation, I am confident
in saying that my animation has met the success criteria and is suitable for the target
audience.