Reflection
Going into this assignment, I felt comfortable that I had a good standard of beginner skills in 2D animation, however I had no experience of working in a group for animation. For the first couple weeks, I felt a little discouraged as my first group was split on what idea to use and some members weren’t as open minded as others so I felt it was easiest to let them do what they want and avoid awkwardness. Luckily the next group I moved to, which I stayed with, were all approachable people I found to be very easy and rewarding to work with.
Although at first I didn’t feel very enthusiastic about the concept of a Nic Cage and FNAF crossover that hadn’t been planned out yet in much detail, it turned out okay in the end as I ended up writing the majority of the story and making the idea into something all the members felt happy to work on. Overall I learnt that I enjoyed working in a smaller group much more as it was easier to speak up and take the lead at times while also making sure everyone else had an opportunity to do the same.
One thing I would do differently if I were to start again would be to have asked for feedback on our character designs sooner as we ended up having to redo most of them. Although our final designs turned out well, if we had sorted out that problem sooner the new characters could have been designed in more detail as I ended up not having time to create references of multiple angles for the characters I worked on.
Something I should do to improve my animation practice would be to spend more time on various software such as AfterEffects and Krita as I only used them to the bare minimum during this module. Instead I stuck to my comfort zone of working in Procreate which may have been a lot quicker and easier to achieve the kind of final result I wanted, but it meant I didn’t learn as much since I was following much the same process as with previous projects.
On the other hand I felt I maintained good time management throughout this module. Initially I was concerned that being in one of the small groups meant I might have a heavier workload but in hindsight I can see I was prepared for this as I was flexible in finding new ways to make my process more efficient without the quality of my final result suffering. I also felt the advantage of having the experience of my foundation year in art as it meant much of the class content was familiar and the exercises were almost all things I felt familiar with.
Overall I felt that I learnt a lot groupwork skills from this module while also improving upon the skills I already had when working alone. I’m really happy with how my team’s project is turning out as it has had a lot of positive feedback from both staff and classmates, with only minor setbacks along the process.