I have a good understanding of secondary actions and enjoy drawing both people and animals, so I think my work ended up being very emotive. Understanding micro expressions and using this skill to portray that, made my animation more effective than if I had not taken the time and skipped this detail. However, time management is a big issue of mine and I poorly planned out how I approached this project, not leaving myself enough time to put more effort into each shot and make my final animation more consistent. For example, the last shot of my animation is by far the most appealing scene being fully coloured and animated. Whereas as the first shot is only has a few extra frames added after the animatic/first pass stage and is not coloured. Although colour was not a requirement in this assignment, I do wish I could have pushed myself to have added the colour in to give the World more life.
I’m naturally a very quiet and nervous person so I was wary going into this assignment, worried that I’d be overlooked or unheard but that mostly proved not to be the case. Whenever I was in my first group in week one, the group picked my world prompt, to which I was very surprised about. The group was very enthusiastic and easy to talk to and the lecturers seemed to like the idea and said it had good potential. This was very a validating feeling and my fears ebbed away. Although, the next few weeks when we were switching groups, I didn’t feel as passionate about the other ideas and the communication between group members was limited. I started to lose motivation but getting the chance to go back into my original group reignited my motivation to contribute more. The final group have been mostly a joy to work with, our communication was strong and if there were any conflicts, we ended up addressing the matter so that we would all be satisfied. Through working in a group this way, I learned a lot about how I can thrive if my group is communitive and open minded like ours was. I also learned that it can be difficult when 2 matters of interest conflict and challenging to overcome.
I think if I were to do this again that I’d attempt to improve my time management and try more experimental work, rather than using only one software the whole time. Due to my job and being ill a few times during semester 1, I was already limited on time, so I avoided even thinking of the possibility of learning a whole new software. However, now looking back this could have been very beneficial to my process and may have aided and ultimately saved me time in some of my animation’s execution. It may have also made certain shots more appealing and smoother. In turn I think this could have improved my animation practice.
If I were to change anything, my animation turned out quite flat, so perhaps try and grasp the concept of staging my shots more affectively. Overall, I’m happy with how my animation turned out and I would keep trying to push and challenge myself to do better so that in future I can see my improvements.