For first year of University, I was excepting a lot of new things that I would be unfamiliar with but in the end it was mainly just Blender and Substance Painter. I was not expecting to be put into a bunch of group projects straight away, some of these groups are so tilting but again groups work always seems to be a cursed of a balance of good and bad people so that there’s always problems, this just generally makes me have to do some more problem solving when issues come up if the group members depend on other people rather than try to figure out something themselves. First year is also a great way to have a create a first impression on people and meet new people who also have the same interests, meeting the right people can seriously make University so much more enjoyable so the group work did help me in creating new friendships. Luckily for me, I met a few people but still by the end of this year, I can confirm. I still don’t know half of the people in class but I can at least recognise their faces.
Blackboard is extremely easy enough to use after a week of looking around it and understanding where each file is located. It’s efficient and neat which I like a lot. The submission at first was confusing but after submitting a few things, again, everything is easy enough to understand. Making a blog wasn’t too difficult for me, I did use to make a whole bunch of power points of work process and research for my previous course so it was kind of similar but much more personal and less formal, that’s probably why I’m able to keep a steady pace and not fall too far behind on the posts. Having a Discord server was pretty cool since it’s something I use daily anyway on my phone or laptop, the channels are kind of confusing due to some of the organisation but I guess there’s really only a few channels to really keep an eye out for so I have muted nearly half of them. I also like that the lecturers are able to be messaged through there instead of going into my emails and typing it up, it feels like threatening to send a question or talk about an issue.
As someone who comes in early for class, It feels like mental health appears to be ignored most of the time, just judging from what I’ve seen or heard around me, some people can’t stop stressing due to the work load or that group members are dragging them behind which is something I can relate to, sadly when we do bring up these people to lecturers they ignore it and just let us keep doing our own thing. I don’t know if this is something that the group has to manage or if they’re purposely ignoring this but in the end of this year, I’ll simply just have to avoid those type of people for future assignments. But when talking to lecturers about my own work instead of the whole group, I get good feedbacks that help me be able to push my own work further and produce better quality. The one to one sessions were pretty helpful too to give them updates on my own current situation of work and how I feel through the months, I didn’t have many problems each time we spoke at the time but maybe it’s because I’m generally just an independent person.
Now comparing from when I started, I can definitely say my confidence in 3D has gotten better. I’ve stopped asking my peers around me for help as I got more use to Blender and substance painter, I can confirm that I feel confident enough to create another character in Blender but it’ll most likely still have a few problems if I do try it out myself but then Blackboard is always there for me to go back on to take a look at. Learning about different animation from different countries and genres were also interesting especially on the different styles and techniques used. I did struggle through learning about film at first but as mentioned through my reflection posts, some of the elements can be connected to my previous course when I did photography, it only got better and much more interesting when we had to do a small analyse on a film provided to us. Sadly, as someone who wants to mainly look into 2D side of animation, we didn’t do much of that in my opinion apart from one assignment for world building. Even if we didn’t do much, through that module I was able to pick up new techniques on how to create interesting settings and designs which I’ll be using a lot for my own personal projects, I just hope that possibly next year there’ll be a lot more of 2D work just so it balances out the 3D from this year.
I did enjoyed how each assignment didn’t have a set pattern to follow so we had a lot of freedom to be creative with the ideas, my grades in the end were all pretty high so I’m extremely proud of myself especially in this environment where I have to be more independent, it also shows the hard work I put into each assignment. Also, I appreciate how the year above had set up a life drawing and that there’s an animation society so everyone can connect more, too bad for me. I didn’t see the point of traveling for an hour to attend them especially around winter when the days were much darker and colder.