During the course of this second semester project, I have learned new skills and advanced pre-existing ones. I have become more comfortable in Blender and Substance, though the latter is one I am still working on.

The biggest challenge in this process was the rigging. I had problems at almost every step and while I did end up figuring everything out until I had a good, solid rig, it might have been one of the longest individual steps in the project as I found it to be much more complex than previous steps. I noticed once I was done that the eye controller was not in the same group with the body and rotation controllers, but this is one of the ways I know I can improve next time. 

I also had trouble with the animation itself – I am used to 2D animation and the computer filling in the gaps between frames still throws me off a bit. I did come to utilise the graph editor, which made the process easier and advanced my knowledge and comfortability in the area. 

In contrast, I enjoyed the pre-production areas of the animation, mainly the storyboard and previs. While I don’t think our pre-production went smoothly – both our previs and storyboard had to be redone several times – I was interested in the work and would like to improve in the area. As I was researching for the previs I found videos on YouTube of unfinished episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars in their previs stage, and I found it fascinating to watch my favourite show in the early stages of production. I felt pulled towards this section of the project and will try to hone my skills in over the summer so that I can consider it as an option for the future. I will do this by trying ‘reverse storyboarding’ – watching a scene and breaking it down into frames to get a more full understanding of the process.

Lastly, I learned about communication. I hope to help handle instances of miscommunication better and earlier in the future, in order to keep the group working well together.