Meeting the Brief

 

There were some areas and features on the brief that I felt like I accomplished well and there were some other things that I think I could have been better at for achieving.

Overall, I feel like I accomplished all the tasks described on the brief for my wix website, but it’s just that some of the tasks, I worked more effetely on and in more detail than I did for the others. For example, I feel like I didn’t work as well and as hard for the research behind my final project and didn’t produce any examples that I felt like I learnt from for the final film project. And I worked three times as much for the production side than anything else in this project, which I feel like was unnecessary. 

 

For that reason, I didn’t think that this project met my slandered for success, in some way. As stated above, I feel like I was able to complete some areas and aspects described in the brief, but not all the tasks. For the examples, I feel like the area of my preparation for the final film, with my research, generated ideas, pre-production, and general production for the film was a bit slopy and lazy and I feel like it all could have been stronger in a way. With more verifications and insight, too really have a good grasp on the idea that had come up with. 

On the other hand, for the evaluation and descriptive area described in the brief, I feel like I really exceled in. This is the one thing that I feel like I’m taking away from this project as a success. With the way I explained every area and detail of my work progress to the audience. Which I’m extremely proud of since I felt like I wasn’t able to this well for most of the project that I did in the past, not just for this year in college, but also for the previous year, as well for in my sessions for my previous secondary school, all of which I work as well in.

 

 

Research 

 

As described above, I felt like my research process for this entire project, for my final film, as not as good as it could have been, for the research I implemented on my intended page on the website, as well as for the information I looked up during my production process. In general, for this project, I feel like I didn’t learn anything from the research that I did, to exploit into the process of my final animation production. 

For any actually drawing techniques processes that I thought would have been relevant to the subject of my film, or any tutorials. The only research that I actually did during the production process was to just look up on how to use this one feature on the animation process.

 

I think that If I were to do something different for next time, it would be to choose a completely different theme for animation that’s more common, one that was a bit more local in a way, and not so random and specific, so that I could look up more relevant research for and also learn greatly from it as its still a subject that I don’t know. All of which I can incorporate into final film. 

 

One thing from my research that I did like was the test animations that I made, which I feel like they consisted of a lot of features and animation methods that I used throughout my final film, so I found them useful. But then again, those tests were only conducted from my own personal, current knowledge and experience back at that time, I didn’t include any foreign research techniques into. 

 

 

 

Effectiveness of Workflow

 

For my workflow, looking back at it from now, I feel like it all was pretty basic and standard. But also, in a way, too simple as well. I feel like I worked on most of the first few tasks at the beginning of this project pretty quickly and with not paying much attention to the quality of it.

But for the production task, as stated above, was the section of this project that I worked the most on and the hardest, but at the same time, it was also basic and boring, if to be honest. I didn’t really change my workflow throughout the entirety of it, and I don’t feel like it was that useful either. Considering the lack of research and learning that I feel like I was supposed to develop throughout the entirety of the process. Which is also another reason that I didn’t really find myself using the Gibbs cycle method for this production period as well as for the evaluation after that. As I didn’t find myself needing to use the technique of implementing research for any particular problem I was having when working on the scenes of the animation, which I found was one of the main necessities for the use of this evaluation cycle. 

 

As stated at the end of my evaluation diary, my exact sequence for my workflow for the production stage, was that I tried to continue on with the basic animation for the different scenes that I had planned out at the beginning of this project, going onto the internet to search up any research for any of the problems that I was having at that current time, with looking for the feature on the animation program that I planned to add into the scene of the animation, taking screen shots and screen recordings along the way to implement into my written evaluation and procedure, which I spend the last couple of hours of the day to do. And also onward from the beginning of the next day, if I haven’t managed to finish it in the time in the day before. 

Which I also had a specific plan for for the difference between the content I implement on the website and on the diary: For the website, I planned to just write up the procedure that I did to get the result of the animation for today’s sessions in as simple way as possible. 

And for the dairy, I instead just sum up that same progress, but with also describing the reason as to why I did it and what I liked about it and not, what I could have done differently for next time.

 

I found that I preferred this method of evaluating and getting the production for the animation done. Another method that I did consider, which was a method I was being used a lot by my other peers in my classroom, when I spent the sessions at collage, which was when they make a new development on their projects, they then go straight to their wix websites to write up that process immediately. 

But I liked my method of working as for some reason, it felt more stable and coordinated to me, with getting on with one side of the project for as long as possible, and then I can focus my attention on the other aspect of the project, all of which I feel like I’m more productive with and manage to produce more better-quality work.

 

 

 

Scope of Project

 

For the scope of the project, I definitely feel like I challenged myself for the final film production of this project. But all in a different way, and not in the way that I had hoped to. The only things I feel like I pushed myself to actually get better at was the evaluation and the written side of this FMP. 

 

I also stretched myself for the animation part of this project. But I was hoping that I work harder on animating the quality of this film more than anything else, but I feel like I was just pushing myself to work more on the production time of the whole project more than anything else. As I described in my production page, I was forced to rush to finish the scenes of the animation (that I planned to work on halfway through the project, as also stated in the production page) which was stretching myself to work a lot more hours of the day to a animate and that was really the only thing that pushed me, which I wasn’t proud of.

I’ll describe this more so in the paragraphs below.

 

 

Management 

 

For my time management for this whole project, including the final production procedure, I feel like I didn’t manage my time well at all. For my idea for the final film, I was hoping to produce a long piece of work, about three minutes in total. Which was a terrible mistake, as I was in way over my head for thinking that I could manage to complete an animation project this large in the time that I was given. I didn’t pay attention to the statics and the mathematics of how long of an animation that you can make in the time that I was given for this whole project. Which saw from the research I did on this specific subject. 

And I also didn’t consider all the other time I had to take to complete all the other tasks before the final production stage, like the proposal, research, and pre-production.

 

Like stated in the paragraphs above, my actual general workflow for all of the tasks that I did for this project,

 

For my work time, since I didn’t have a part time job during this project for the FMP, and I live with my parents currently, so I don’t have to worry about all the other basic activities that maintain a good life style with buying food and paying for accommodation, I just planned to spend all of my time for the whole of the days for all the previous weeks during this project, which I think greatly increased the general production and quality for the whole of my project, as I spent a lot more it, especially since I incorporated the use of my laptop at home, form which I can access the work I’ve done on the computers at the collage, including the animate program for the production of the animation, and vice versa. Which I found incredible useful.

 

 

Autonomous Learning

 

Personally, I find that I’ve always preferred to work alone on any projects set to me by the teachers as well as any other projects outside of collage, for my personal hobbies or other work-related tasks presented to me.

For this project, at the beginning I was a bit unsure about making my own decisions for this project and what idea I was going to do and how. But I feel like I coped with it well. After just following the tasks on the brief as well as the project handbook, I found my idea for my project and my workflow pretty easily, with also making my own decisions in the process. All of which I thought made the result of the final project fine. Granted, there were sometimes that I needed a little assistance for some small areas of this project that I might have missed in the brief or didn’t understand, but I found that I always had a lot of help available to me to ask for, which I found useful. 

 

I found that I learnt a lot of things about myself about the length of my ability to work on the certain tasks of this project and what kind of quality I was able to produce it at.

One of the main things that I found I could do well, as stated multiple times in the paragraphs above, is my ability to evaluate the work process that I did for the production of this whole process, as well as describing in a manner that the audience will find easy to look and enjoy. 

But at the same time as being able to produce this sort of work which I feel is the most impressive part of this whole FMP project, I also still think that my ability to write in general could be improved on greatly, as I feel like my writing skills aren’t that good and are too slow. And if they were better, and faster, I feel like I could work on the other sections of this task at an even better production rate, thus making the rest of the quality for my work even better. 

But I don’t exactly know how to improve on this aspect about me for next time, other than to just continue writing and typing on my work, and slowly developing over that period of time. 

 

Most of the issues that I came across during the production of this project, that I had to overcome by myself, I practically solved by just looking it up on the internet, with looking for tutorials as well as websites, all of which I found useful to myself, as was able to resolve it by myself. 

 

 

Ideas

 

For the ideas that I had for the final animation film, for the way they progressed, that I found and felt like, were mainly just by my own initiative and by brainstorming at the beginning of this process. With times during the day, I find myself constantly going over the different scenes of the film in my head, and how I imagine them to look good quality and satisfying for the viewers, and then I incorporate those ideas into the actual pre-production ideas on my website. Which, looking back at it now, I feel like was really unjustified and thought-out process to develop my ideas for this film. 

At the beginning of this project for my proposal, I looked at a bunch of videos and clips from films that I remember have the same sort of theme and style of animation that I planned to replicate, which is the kind of process that I had imagined to be the correct way to progress with my ideas for this film. But I didn’t go with that sort of method. 

 

All of which I feel like made the outcome of the theme for my final film and the style of animating it kind of low quality and lazy going, as I just came up with one idea mainly and just decided to go with that in the end.

Going back to my research section above, I feel that maybe if I did more research online for different animation techniques styles that are more common and that I can find more easily, and then incorporate those styles into my film to come up with a better idea for the film, which would have been better quality, I figured.

Something I’ll defiantly remember for next time. 

 

 

Decision Making

 

I find that there was a tone of wrong decisions that I made for this entire FMP project, compared to the right ones that I think make the production and quality of the film al lot better. Many of which have already been described above. 

One of the main, wrong decisions I made for this project as described was the fact of coming up with an animation idea that was that had a time duration that would be impossible for myself to animate all the sequence of in the time that I was given in the weeks to complete. Even with my thorough production workflow, with spending all the time that I could at the collage site and in my household. And as presented in the other page on this website with final exported films on, I had to make the decision to cut out a huge majority of the film and its story, all of which contained a crucial aspect of this film, which I planned to be one of the main entertainments of the film to the audience, which was the story aspect behind. And the events that took place in the film, I had planned to present an intricate detailed story plot and narrative, that would make the audience interested. With the way that most of the patterns and colours that were produced by the protagonist character in this film, were supposed to display different emotion from the character, as well as from the antagonist character which was supposed to display the opposite emotions from the protag, as described in the pre-production page on this website. 

Granted, there are still these scenes of the film for the audience to watch and gain entertainment from the visuals, but the quality of the film is still not to the degree that I was hoping for. 

This is a huge mistake that has affected my whole FMP project, and I will definitely be more cautious about it for the future, by mainly keeping my expectations low on the length of the animation that I wanted to produce, and maybe focus more on the quality of the animation instead, like stated above. 

 

In a way, and in complete honesty, I was slightly confused by the quality of the product that we were supposed produce for this FMP project for the teachers to see. I was kind of expecting for the teachers to expect us to make a long piece of work like we all made in the previous tasks over the year for this course. 

But over in the middle of the production weeks for this project, I slowly began to realise that that was not the case (at least not for the subject of this film that I chose to do, 2D animation), but by then, it was too late for me as I was in the middle of the production for the film.

 

 

Pride

 

There are an assortment of different areas and section in this whole project that I found that I liked and that I was proud of, and that I didn’t like, and fished that I had done better at it for this project. 

 

For the things that I’m proud of, like stated multiple times in the paragraphs above, the thing that I was most proud of from this project, and the thing that I feel like I accomplished the best at, was the written evaluation and procedures for the production of the final film. As I stated above, I found that I never used to work well in this area of any project that I did in the past, for the work at this collage, and for work in my previous school, my secondary school. I’m proud that I managed to develop this skill in this FMP project and that I also exploited it well for this project. I plan to use this skill for many other projects to come in the future. 

Another thing that I was proud of were some of the animated scenes in the film that I managed to make. With the way that they looked satisfying and visually appealing to the viewers, with the different patterns and colours, like in the fire work explosion scene, after the first one where it displayed a bunch of these patterns and styles from which I had planned to implement in the rest of the animation sequence, one thing that I plan to take with me for the future projects. 

I’m also proud with my new ability to make to get across this adobe animation program, and understand how to use all these new and useful features on it, which has increased on the quality on my animation greatly, which I think will be extremely useful for other 2D animation projects I’ll make in the future, and which I can work more efficiently at now that I’ve gone through working with it on this project looking up tutorials on the internet on how to use it, which I now do. 

 

For the things that I’m not proud of for this project, as also stated multiple times in the paragraphs above, was the basic animation production procedure for the film, which I had hoped would be better in terms of the timing that it took me to make it and how it ended up being cut down drastically. 

I’m extremely disappointed by this final film product that I was only able to produce for this final major project. And I wish that I could have made something better to present to my teachers and any other viewers that might be looking through my website. 

And I would be horrified and embarrassed I was only able to produce this kind of work for a project much larger and imported than this one, like a full feature film.

So I plan to be a lot more cautions of the work that I plan to produce and just implement a lot more pre-production and planning to the film before I get onto actually making it. And on another basic note, to just aim for a much simpler animation film and smaller as well, not stretching myself too much.  

 

 

 

Skills

 

For the specific skills that I learned throughout this project, as stated multiple times above, was the new ability to evaluate my work efficiently and in great detail, for my animation production and the other aspects behind the whole of this project. 

Another skill is also being able to look up specific tutorials and websites on the internet, as part of research and resources, to help me continue on with my work for the final animation and telling me how. And also describing the reason for the use of this video and if it was useful to me in any way. 

 

One skill that I wanted to develop from this project most of all, was my animation skills, which in honest, I don’t feel like I succeeded that well in, which I’m disappointed in.

I might not have developed the skills that I was looking for, but I still managed to try out a couple of new animation techniques which I didn’t before, so I guess I was happy with those in a way. The skills being basic, full body character animation, which was one of the other main aspects about this film that I liked the look, with the way that the characters movements look real and move in a fluent and realistic way. 

As well as some of the sections for the patterns and colours in this scene as well, which I really liked the look of.

 

 

Future

 

For my plans for more animation projects in the future, after having gone through this process of this FMP project, including the final animation procedure and the product of the film, I plan to focus on much smaller animation projects. That consists of a lot more planning and preparation before the actual production procedure itself, to make a film that is a lot shorter, but focuses a lot more on detail and quality of the scenes of the animation instead. And to avoid making a long durational film that is meant to focus on more on the story aspect of the film rather, and to risk it all being too long to finish in time before the deadline. 

 

For that, I have found this entire final major project extremely useful for my skill as a future animator. And I look forward to the next project that is to come to greater increase on my abilities.