REFLECTION

This project has been such a challenge, and yet very rewarding. While it wasn’t fully finished for submission, I’m really proud of where we got to. My main success is in how it is fully animated, lined and coloured. There’s a lot in hindsight that I wish we’d been able to do, some thumbnails before reworking have more personality and certain ideas would’ve been fun to explore. There’s some animations I wish I could go back and fix, some transitionary shots like when Meredith is walking into the apartment at the end. The cut to the next shot feels a bit abrupt. My inexperience with comp means some scenes didn’t turn out quite how I wanted too.

I’m also proud of how me and Will communicated throughout this project. I think we learnt key skills in conflict resolution and balancing stress as a team. The fact we moved so efficiently through production and implemented feedback quickly is an accomplishment, I think. We were idealistic at the start of the project, but I think scheduling and constantly reviewing where we were in production helped us to manage our time more effectively. We made some concessions to get the film ready for submission, but the amount of work we pulled off despite that and the technical difficulties makes me happy. We exceeded where we were expected to be by this point, and keeping to a tighter schedule definitely kept the production moving. Being able to critically evaluate the project while working on it benefitted the film, even when sacrifices had to be made to complete it.

Overall, I think my biggest regrets are not spending more time figuring out character turnarounds and drawing consistently. While I think it was necessary to keep the momentum going before Christmas break, it means my sketches are quite disorganised. I’m most impressed with how quickly I saw improvement in my skills as an animator. Looking back on my work from a year or two ago, I’ve grown so much. The rapid nature of final year pushed me to improve. Some animations are more flawed than others, there’s a few shots with really obvious volume control issues. Some shots could’ve been more complex too, but in all, I feel very accomplished. We have a plan moving forward towards the end of year show to complete the film entirely, and I think it’s feasible with how much we’ve achieved so far. This year was full of challenges but our persistence to hand in a film of (hopefully) good quality powered us through.