Reflecting on our Assignment 2 for our World of Animation module, I found myself really enjoying the project as part of our final work for the semester. I chose to focus on the topic of American animation due to a good majority of animation’s history being based in the country, along with my general preference for western animated media. Initially our group consisted of five members, and we made a point to start our research early by getting a head start over our Easter Break, however complications arose when more students selected the topic afterward, which caused our group to be split apart.
Despite this, I found working in a group of three to be more beneficial. It allowed our group to divide the workload evenly and plan accordingly, along with the people I was grouped with turning out to be very reliable as everyone was motivated and thorough when working on the poster, along with being able to communicate clearly and consistently to the others when issues had surfaced. Additionally, I also felt that our group got along well personality-wise too, making the work and communication feel much more manageable as a result.
As for my own work on the project, I personally feel very proud of my contributions and original thinking when it came to our ideas. The main topic we decided to cover was the ‘Evolution of Disney through its eras’. The initial source we used for this topic listed eight different eras in Disney’s history, and to condense the information we were going to present, we decided to cut out two of the least interesting eras and divided the remaining six between our group members, which resulted with me covering the Golden Age and the Renaissance Age. I was happy to cover these eras as they are arguably huge cornerstones of Disney’s history, and thus I had plenty of material to work with for my main points. I decided to write out my points as full paragraphs with my references included, all being gathered from both physical and online sources, which I would then shorten down to fit into our poster. Despite this, our poster still ended up with a large amount of text, however it was enough to show our work and engage readers, hence I am happy with the effort I had put into my research.
Additionally, wanting our poster to stand out and appear more original, I came up with a unique layout idea inspired by old animation customs by featuring note cards that had our written information surrounding an old-fashioned animator’s desk which had our poster’s title in the centre. This design would be drawn by hand and then have our researched information edited in afterward, my job ending up being the designing the background using art software I had access to, which proved to be an enjoyable and creatively rewarding task. Initially, our group had a more interactive idea for the design with the suggestion of having our text be printed on smaller documents that would be attached to the main poster to resemble actual sticky notes, which would have allowed for viewers to flip up the cards to see reference images that would back up our points. However, due to time constraints and our group agreeing that this approach would be too cumbersome for the passing viewer, we decided to simplify by having the note cards simply be drawn on instead. Despite this, I still feel proud of my artistic efforts and feel that we achieved our goal of having an eye-catching quality, as evidenced by the positive opinions I received during our poster presentation.
To summarize, I felt overall very happy with this assignment we were given and found enjoyment in a good amount of the work set, I got along well with my group members, as we all worked together in a very supportive manner, and I am happy with the chance I got to add some creative expression to the project. Moving forward, I feel much more confident with working on research and essay projects like this one and hope to keep up the good quality we achieved when going into next year.
-Below are links to my full research paragraphs that I wrote that weren’t able to be fit into my reflective blog post, along with photos of notes I had made when researching sources and ideas for our poster: