[Uni project] SPACE JAPAN... and... politics?

Our third Animation project. We were tasked with creating a cut-out animation with the theme of politics. Politics being one of my weakest points, I decided to look up some news that didn't involve the stereotypical, big nosed MPs. It was after a short time of searching when a friend of mine linked to an article about the Japanese government. Here is the article:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/10-000-free-round-trip-tickets-japan-134142507.html

Seeing this as a link to government and politics, I decided to base my animation on this. My next problem was that I didn't know much about Japan. After some thought, I remembered how often I got frustrated about people thinking Japan was nothing but anime, giant monsters and of course, EVERYTHING being cutesy, so I vented this into my work.

The animation is linked below:

Looking back at the animation, this is to date, my least favourite outcome from an assignment. My main flaw was that I was extremely over ambitious for a one week project. I aimed to get the animation 10 around two minutes, explaining how Japan isn't entirely as people preconceive it to be, but time limits got the better of me and I feel as if the finished work was somewhat slap-dash. My second flaw is the voices, or more, lack of voices. My microphone was having troubles at the time and I only managed to record some quiet, poor quality lines which had to go into the film.

Finally, I had to improvise with a home-made light-box of sorts. The ones we used in University had glass panels, which didn't make much of a difference in the back-lit sand animations, but in a fully lit cutout animation I was getting reflections in the glass in a lot of the shots.

As a temporary improvisation, I created a box of my own using whatever I had lying around in the room. It was a cobbled together creation, but it managed to do the job!

Above: Improvisation is the mother of creation!