Alfie Gunter - Computer Animation Arts : May 2020

Thursday, 21 May 2020

Major Project Reflective Statement

Coming off the back of minor I knew there was a lot that I needed to improve, some unexpected issues such as the story needed to be changed. This was down to me knowing what was going on in the story and not considering the audience enough. Tackling the story changes as well as making sure that my characters were animation ready continued for a lot longer than expected, especially the characters. Originally I was hoping to have my characters done by the end of January but that never happened. At this point January feels so long ago I can't remember why I let the rigging for my characters take so long. I just remember that every time that I felt close to being done and trying to set myself a deadline for it, but could never seem to meet it and it would drag out longer.

However, some of the time I spent finishing my rig allowed for easier animation later such as the way the arms/wings. Although, this is something I wish I had sorted out a lot sooner so I could focus more time on my props and environments. I feel as though those suffered a bit because a large amount of time became focused on the characters. I would have liked to definitely spend more time on the environment for when the pigeon is on the ground and try to make it look bigger than it is. Some of the props like the machine gun a little plain and basic, this was originally because of a talk with Alan and Phil about using simple shapes and letting the textures do the work. However, for me personally I feel as though I started doing that and then neglected it because of other aspects of the project. Despite the issues I had going into major I'm glad that I manged to have to functioning characters and even though this did impact some other areas I'm still proud that I managed to do it.

Unexpectedly, as I started to move towards starting animation is when lockdown was announced along with some family problems. This made the first few weeks a challenge to do not having to adapt to being inside all the time when I'm the kind of person who finds being at the university a lot more productive then being hidden in my room. I had to deal with family issues as well and not being able to return home during this time was difficult. However, I think I managed to adjust. Some days were definitely not as productive as I would have hoped and other the isolation from distractions would really help. Animation has never really been my strong suit and I noticed I have a habit of unintentionally adding extra keys or not positioning keys correctly, things that once someone pointed it out I would think "yeah that's really obvious, how did I miss that?". Working with some peers in a voice call and showing them animation as I went along really helped me get a fresh set of eyes that usually made the animation better. As mentioned animation is not my strongest area so trying to understand the way my bird characters worked was a challenge. However. thanks to Nat and Alan they helped me realize things that I had missed or could include, which I tried to include throughout.

Overall, I feel proud of the work I have done and also still a bit disappointed when noticing things that could be better. These can obviously be improved upon before rendering but I feel I lack the ability to do them efficiently and fast enough. I still need to improve on things such as panic working and not jumping around my project doing different things without finishing them. I hope that once I graduate I can continue to work on all the things I learnt at university so that on day I can go on to work on bigger and better things.