For the first semester of my animation module I had quite the journey of ups and downs. Things that I would consider to be highlights of the semester would definitely be my character designing skills have improved drastically from before I started the course. When we were working on designing characters for our animation, I tried designing a simple character during the lesson using basic shapes to lay out the outline of him. Even though the character was not meant to be for the animation jam project I still felt that using the shapes language technique to build him made him much more appealing and intriguing compared to other designs I had created in the past. I also feel as though I have a better understanding of how to appropriately storyboard now as before I didn’t know how to label a storyboard properly whereas after reading over the slides from that lecture I understood what I had to label and where the labels were to go.
Something that didn’t go so well was the perspective and composition work, I didn’t understand this concept very well and as such I struggled a LOT to do this part of the course. When I was looking for screenshots of scenes to use which had one-point and two-point perspectives in them I couldn’t tell which had which and it began to stress me out as I buried my head in the sand to hide from it, but after I spoke to someone about it and got them to explain it to me again I finally got the gist of what I was looking for in the screen shots. I’m still not too sure I did the perspective pieces correctly but I feel as though I had more of an understanding than I did when I first started trying to do it.
While Working on the bird spies group I learned just how diverse a single idea could become when multiple minds work together to build it. For example our world started out as just a world full of birds, that were spies but now that we’ve worked on it over so many weeks it has evolved into a world with it’s own organisation of the Featheral Birds of Investigation who are investigating a case of squirrel flu the squirrels are planning to release into the public. While it can sometimes be quite hard to work on a team when people on your team are off during classes and other things the real teamwork shows through when you work over these hurdles.
If I were to restart the module I think I would try to come in on that first class I missed even if I was off ill, mainly because I wish I could be much more involved in the idea generation process which I wasn’t really part of.
I think I need to practice my storyboarding and drawing other creatures that are outside of my comfort zone.
I wouldn’t change anything about my progress as in my opinion everything is worth keeping.