Evaluation

Over the course of this project we focused on creating a documentary which depicted a sense of documentation of a truthful event, which was where we decided to talk about the death of a family member relating to one of my partners. Personally over all I think this project went partly well, but has been disappointing in how it was planned out.

This was positive in the sense that we managed to sort out our scenes and was able to create a finished animation. The main problem which dampened the project the bad organisation and miscommunication with in our group we didn't inform each often of our progress and Molly one of my partners failed to attend set meeting revolved around the issue of our progress we never saw her as often as we should have which meant our group was not organised well enough. A lot of work by Molly was handed to both me and James, they did not feature any of these scenes created by me which slowed the progress of our work because the animated scenes were not shared well between everyone with in the group. Both me and my partner James ended up working on our own bits individually before combining both my scenery and his characters. Generally, Communication slowed down our progress because we did not have enough communication between us all even though we use social media we did not stay in touch regularly. Me and James waited a very long time for Molly to finish her scene very close to the deadline.

For this project we got a lot of inspiration for our animation from books and other documented animations which were shown to us by our tutors and helped in spire our animated ideas even further by giving us an understanding into what communicates well with a target audience e.g. colours, style. I also looked at one of my very own favourite artists called R.Kikuo Johnson reason being that his art was very simplistic and effective in its representation of human characters in making them look appealing both colours and style this was to help with both characters and environment.

Over all I would say that the project went well generally but the was negatively effected by the lack of communication with I myself, Molly and James, if I was to do this project again, I would say that I would have decided on picking partners who I knew that I would get on with well and people I would be able to trust with their side of the project. One of the things I would focus on is the social media side of communicating, even though we formed a group on Facebook the communication on that was not regular so I would say that better organisation of social media would be need to help improve our experience of working with each other because we lacking in communication skill based on this area.

The main thing I can take away from this brief is that I have worked as part of a team experienced what is like to bring multiple styles to create one animated piece. I have also improved my animating skills even more because I learned to use more new tools like the Puppet Tool in After-effects which I never knew existed in. I have developed an understanding of what styles work well with one another and how to make an animation appeal to a specific audience through visuals. Things I would say that I would need to learn from this overall experience is to have better communication with my partners mainly because we spent too much time apart and did not talk about our work much, another problem was our drawing styles which were said to not work well with one other, we managed to get them working with one another but majority of this was spent sorting out making sure our drawings styles worked well for the final outcome of our work.

I was very sceptical about working in a collaborative group for this brief, my idea was to work on my own animation and I was not too keen on who I would be paired. I slowly started to warm to the idea the more the project went on and would now say that is a great experience because it has developed both my communication and has made me in to a better animator because I have now developed not just the skill to animate but the ability to share ideas and work alongside others. Personally I didn't feel comfortable with the story based on family deaths, I think it could have been based on something else reason being that I would say this is a common thing people talk about when giving a family documentary and the idea that we were aiming this animation at young children seemed a bit depressing for a child. I didn't think that representing this idea in a childlike style would take any child’s mind of the idea of death as an issue, I would say it was too much of a sad issue to pitch to children as a document.

Things I would personally critique on the final animation is the colour of the text and how it was presented, it is very basic in its appearance and the way the character’s work well but could interact better with the background, I would say that I would have made the characters e.g. prints when they walked or just made them look like they work involved with the scenery maybe through the style which they were presented and the colours could have been a bit darker. I think, there are not enough movements in characters, they seem very rigid in how they move on screen.

I am planning to work with the puppet pin tool a lot more in the future, personally I think I need to practice more with After-effects so I am able to use it a lot more fluently because during this project I was still learning new skills whilst still working which slowed down the progress I was making with my animated work, so I plan to prefect this for my future project through watching tutorials using After-effects over the summer to help build my animated work skills.