Evaluation

Throughout this module I’ve learnt a lot about working with other people and what I have to do to get a team working efficiently. I’ve also learnt how to read a brief so that I can create exactly what the client want out of me. The briefs that I wanted to do had to be in my focus of interest other wise I won’t find the brief enjoyable, so I wanted a brief that may had some 3D animation outcomes or something where I can work on my drawing abilities.

The reason I entered in these kinds of briefs was so that I could improve my drawing skills and work on my Maya abilities so that I can become a better animator in general. This is why I chose to do briefs like ’11 Second Club’, ‘Do It In Ten’ and ‘Onform Sketches’ because these give me opportunities to work on my abilities in 3D and drawing. I did the competition Onform Sketches because I felt like my drawing skills were quite poor compered to my other skills, so I wanted to build on that by drawing on a shape once every week and improve my drawing skills and my imagination, which is what Onform Sketches allowed me to do.

For the second part of this module, which was the collaboration practice, I decided to work on the ‘Dazed and Confused’ D&AD competition because the brief focused more on film and animation which is my field of interest and which I thought I could get the most/best work out of.

The ‘Onform Sketches’ brief is a weekly challenge where we a given a shape and we have to create something with that shape, if your shape is good enough it will get posted on to the Onform Sketches website. For this I produced ten different creations using the shapes, which meant one shape a week foe ten weeks. I found this challenge entertaining but quite hard because each shape is different from the rest and there can be sometimes where the shape is to hard from me to come up with any ideas to draw in to it. Other times the shape gives me ideas instantly and I can draw that idea on with no problem at all. However, once I’ve created my idea on the shape I then had to post it online for the judge to look at and if its good enough she will repost it on her website. Unfortunately some of my where not good enough to make it on to her website but that just made me want to do another idea for the shape and see if I can do a better job. I feel like this challenge has improved my drawing skills and helped my imagination to be more creative than before.

For the ‘Do It In Ten’ brief I had the theme chilly so I decided to go comedic with my animation and have someone looking in the fridge for 2 hour and not deciding what they want to have to eat and then freezing over. I did this because it is a common first world problem for students not having any food in to eat but can’t decide what to do, I relates to a large number of people even me. However my time management on this brief was the worst I’ve had because I was also on a cruise for most of the month, then Christmas and then new years, so throughout the month I only really worked on this animation for about seven days that’s it. This meant that my animation isn’t as good as I would of liked it to be and I wish I could of changed a few things about it like giving the animation a better background and the person in the animation better movements. I do like the character design though for my animation and it did come second in the monthly competition so all in all I’m happy with it.

The ’11 Second Club’ competition is the brief where I feel like I had the most enjoyment from it because I could animate in 3D with a pre rigged model they provided. I feel like this competition taught my a lot about animating in 3D because I realised that it’s easier to animate the characters movements first and then do the lip sinking afterwards because then you get a better performance from the character. I learnt this the hard way and animated one of my characters the wrong way and started with the lip sinking and not the movements. I feel like this is one of the better animations I’ve produced in a while but I’d still like to change thing about it like giving the characters different textures and improving the movements on the characters so that they don’t seem stationary.

Finally the collaborative competition, this for me was the hardest because working with others makes me feel like I have to take charge of every thing so that I can keep a track on what’s going on and see if my partners are working according to plan. I found the whole experience stressful because I was in charge of one stop motion animation and post-production so I had to wait for my team mates to finish their work so that they could hand it over to me. I was also in charge of putting together all of the animations we had to do, which were 4 and then a BTS video as well. I feel like this brief has given me more confidence in being a director and speaking out my opinions to other people. If I could change anything I would change the way I edited the videos because I feel like I now know a lot more about after effects the software I worked in, this is because I feel like the videos could have been edited differently by not having the same effects in all of the videos and make them unique by having a unique asset in each video and then bring them all together in the final video so that they work as a whole piece as well.          

  

Project Report

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My Collaborative Contribution

Throughout the collaborative brief I feel like I've gained more confidence in becoming a director and telling people what to do and how to do it. I've also learnt that a team needs to communicate more and not just once a week because I feel like with are animations we could of done a better job. However I did like the turn out of are animations and that we show are message off using different styles of animation and techniques. I can safely say that this experience has helped me imagine what the real world industry will be like and how I will cope with in it.

Individual Practice

My experience through out the individual practice was interesting, most of the briefs I liked doing especially the 11 second club competition because it let me animate in 3D which is my preferred media. However the the Do It In Ten competition was my least favourite because I feel like I could of produced a better quality animation and if I could do it again I would give myself better time management. With the Onform Sketches I feel like it had helped me gain better drawing abilities and ideas when it comes to character design, plus it's given me more confidence in my own work and getting it out there in the real world.    

Responsive: Even More Onform Sketches

Following on from the other onform sketches I'be done, I've also done four other ones which in no coincidence I've all done in the theme of animals. Some of the shapes that we got given were hard to do and I could not think of an idea for them but for these four shapes the ideas just came straight to my head.

The first shape was in the shape of a big nose, so I thought I'm not drawing a nose on this shape because its way too obvious to do. So the second idea I had was a turtle with a really big shell, but for some reason I decided to make the turtle sad and I don't know why. I had to look up turtles on the internet because I didn't really know how to draw a turtle and if the shape would work but I made it work. This drawing was a simple sketch with no shading because I thought it works just as an outline drawing.

The second shape was a bit more difficult to think of an idea to do but from out of the blue I thought of swans and that this shape looks a bit like a swans beak. After seeing this it was easy enough to draw because swans are black and white which are the only colours we can use, so it was just the mater of drawing a swans face.

For the third shape I went with drawing a little chick because that was the only thing I could think of and it would look kind of cute because the shape is quite big so it will make the chick look chubby. The only thing I don't like about this sketch are the feet on the chick because I couldn't get them right and they were looking weird every time I redrew them, so I just went with stick feet which also kind of look like robin feet.    

Finally the fourth shape looked like an iron and so that was my first idea but I went to look on the onform sketches webpage to look for more inspiration and found that someone has already drawn out an iron for the shape. So I went back to photoshop and started sketching random stuff, until I made the top part of the shape sharp. This gave me the idea of doing a rhino for this shape, I also added a bit of shading the the sketch to make the rhino more appealing and I just reshaped the shape just a little so that it would look more like a rhino.

All in all I'm happy with the outcome of my sketches and I probably would not change them if I had a chance to redraw them. If I did have to redraw them I would just make improvements to them like changing the patten on the turtles shell, and adding more detail to the chicks character.

Animated Documentary: More Scenes

The next scene that I did was the part where the father orangutang is playing with the child orangutang but then the father gets tired and falls to sleep. With this I made the father orangutang pick up the child and throw him up in the air and catch him again. I animated this scene in Photoshop and its about 5-6 seconds long, this took longer than the last scene because there was more to animate and I tried to have the orangutang turn 45 degrees at the beginning to add a bit of something to the scene.

I've only done half of this scene so far because I'm not to sure on what I'm going to do at the part where I mention my father falls asleep. I've got different ideas about how I'm going to execute that part of the animation but for now I'm just going to leave it.

I've not finished this scene yet because I still need to add in the fingers and the last part of the scene, however I feel like it needs to be tweaked in After Effects when all the animation part is done. I like all the movements in the animation, yes the movements they gutter a bit but thats in the style of the animation. However, I'm not to keen on the faces I gave them but I'm not to sure why but it might be the fact that I've been staring at it too long, I don't know but I'll ask for someones opinion soon about it.    

Animated Documentary: Animating My Scenes

We have now started the animation process for this module so Molly and I have to animate are own parts of the story and then we give that to Malachi and he has to then place the animated backgrounds to are animations. I started off by animating the first scene of my story and introduce my characters, this was all animated in Photoshop and then taken to After Effects to add a bit of distortion and rough edges to the animation.

In the animation you see the father orangutang playing with the child orangutang whilst the you hear the narrator taking you through what is happening. This first scene lasts for seven seconds but it didn't take me that long to do because in the second half of the scene I just talk about his looks so I didn't know how to animate to that so I had a shot of the father orangutang and then just added some facial expressions. However, I might go back and add more movement to the second half of the first scene because I still feel like there isn't enough movement going on.

I also did an animation test seeing wether it would look nicer with more distortion around the orangutangs or not. I did this because this is going to one of the ways we show emotion through are animation so the bigger the distortion the more powerful the emotion will be. I showed my tutors this and they said that they liked the one with more distortion but they didn't like it on the background so I'l keep that in mind for the rest of the scenes that I need to animate.