I found that this module has taught me a lot which is quite surprising because I thought I knew quite a lot about After Effects before. I have had quite a lot of experience animating using Flash and had an ok understanding of After Effects before we even started the module, however I didn't realise that there was still so much for me to learn.
When the module started I was really confident about it and tried to get into it straight away. I took the conscious effort to pick a topic really early on so that I didn't spend ages being indecisive, which is something that I always end up saying I wish I wouldn't do. This worked out well for me because I got it into my head that I needed to be decisive and then I didn't end up needing to change my ideas or my approaches as much as in other modules and I think it shows that my processes and developments are much more focussed around my subject area.
I picked a subject area that i am quite interested in: Movie Villains. I love cinema and villains are obviously a big part of that so I found the subject quite interesting. This helped me feel focussed on the subject and I had a bit of previous knowledge that helped me decide on particular villains and know some of their attributes and personalities to start figuring out how best to represent them.
As well as picking the topic early, I also picked the style of animation that i wanted to create. I decided quite early on that I wanted to use simple shapes and colours to represent the villains and that I wanted it to be a light hearted animation which shows off the more harmless, cliched side of villains. By setting myself these restrictions it left me a lot more time to focus on developing the work in one specific direction and again stopped me from procrastinating by deciding on ideas that go in loads of different directions.
In the past I have wasted a lot of time on coming up with loads and loads of different idea directions when they aren't necessary and then ending up regretting it later when I start running out of time. This is something that i will definitely take forward into the next brief and onwards: Be decisive and do it quickly.
Unfortunately I found it difficult to become motivated in the middle of the brief and this led to me falling behind by quite a lot. This has definitely affected the quantity of the work that I have produced and the quality to a degree, however I took the time to catch up and engaged a lot more with the course as a whole over the last 2 weeks which has definitely pushed me to make much better resolutions to the brief. Spending a lot of time in college definitely helps with motivation, especially around the studios where others do the same and people can constantly give you little bits of feedback or even just say that they like what are producing which is motivation in itself. In future briefs I aim to spend considerably more time around the studios just as I have in the last couple of weeks and I think that it will improve noticeably improve my resolutions.
All in all I am quite pleased with what I have produced. The style and simplicity of the animations is almost exactly what I had in mind when developing my ideas and the use of colours works well to relate the resolutions back to E4 and give it an exclusive E4 appeal. I definitely prefer my Idents to my Title sequence as they were obviously more thought through and they were the starting points of the title sequence. I think the idents each work nicely on their own as teaser trailers to the show and they are kept short and precise and fit the 10 second gap well, however the Title sequence just seems to be missing something in comparison.
I am also relatively happy with the sound effects and packaging. The simple design in the packaging is very similar to what I originally had in mind, only there were a couple of more elaborate plans that I hadn't thought through well enough and couldn't be applied to the final thing.
To extend the project I would definitely rethink the title sequence and spend more time trying to make the packaging work as I had originally intended.
How would you grade yourself on the following areas:
5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
Attendance = 2
Punctuality = 4
Motivation = 2
Commitment = 3
Quantity of work produced = 3
Quality of work produced = 4
Contribution to the group = 4
In the next module I aim to make all of these numbers much higher.
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