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.