Evaluation

     This module ultimately gave me a lot of opportunities to publish my work onto professional websites to win competitions, however due to the time limits on each competition on top of my course deadlines I did not feel confident enough to enter most of my pieces.

     Despite this, I still had an enjoyable experience in making most of my work; I tried out different techniques and mediums that I do not get chance to practice otherwise. I wanted each piece to revolve around learning a new task, such as perspectives or colouring, which I managed to experience while completing this module.

     The brief analysis and pitching tasks at the start of the year for our individual practice had a lot of potential to be useful in teaching me how to pick an appropriate brief for developing my practice. Though I did learn a few useful tips in how to present myself, I still did not understand exactly what work we had to present, so did not feel confident while in the pitching sessions, especially to people I do not know very well.

     Even though I started late in my other competition briefs due to focusing on the pitch boards for the taught sessions, I still managed to map out a rough plan of when I should have completed each task. The area of practice I want to develop further for my career is animating, so a lot of the tasks took me a lot longer than I had anticipated, which means most of them are rough, unfinished pieces of work.

     Having to create more than one animation for most of the briefs in order to make them substantial took its toll on the quality of my work, since I could not spend as much time on each piece - however I have produced a lot and there is potential with each animation to take further and include in my showreel, which was my ultimate goal through this module. I would have liked to have the animations finished in time for this deadline and entered into their original competitions, but I have learnt a lot about managing my time and which techniques work better.

     The opportunity to collaborate came in the second half of the year; this was a new experience for me, and having the chance to work with my classmate proved to be an enjoyable task. Taking what we had learnt from completing the individual pitch boards, we chose the Propercorn brief and get creative with our final idea; the pitching of our idea a few weeks into the project did not go as well as we had hoped, with suggestions that we should change our idea. This ultimately took its toll on us, since we had six weeks all together to hand in for the deadline and we received this feedback too far into the process, we had to re-develop another idea in less time.

     This meant that I did not have time to make a full 30 second animation; this is an ambitious amount of work anyway but even halving that time for the animation sample we ultimately decided to submit was only just manageable.

     Doing this collaboration made me realise that it is harder to replicate someone else’s designs than I had originally thought; though the gnome design we had continued with was good and seemed fairly simple, I could not redraw it in more than one position. This limited the final animation slightly, since I had less time to make it anyway it would have been harder to try and move the character more than I did.

     Apart from this, we worked well together and easily agreed on how each stage of the process was going; I can rely on her to get her parts of the work done, so it was easier for me to focus on my tasks.

     In conclusion, I have learnt a lot about my area of practice by completing this module; even though my time was split between too many tasks, I have enjoyed using most of the techniques I have tried. It has made me realise that I can see potential for a career in any area of animation, which does not narrow down what I want to specialise in, but means I cannot rule out any possibilities which I would have done if I had not tried them in these tasks. The main area of improvement for myself is organising and managing my time better, if I had realised how long each project would take I would have given myself more time on each.