Responsive - Evaluation

I really enjoyed this project and leant a lot from it. Because the module was organised and executed so poorly it taught me to use my initiative and to think for myself instead of relying on estudio for the information. Besides this, I developed my hand drawn animation skills and also my animation skills in general. Also I did something unconventional for one of my personal competitions, I competed in a programming competition. The reason I did this is because rigging/technical development is an area I am very interested in and would like to explore further.

For the first study task, we were instructed to apply to competitions relevant to our practice. The competitions I submitted entries to were 11 second club, loopdeloop and codechef. 11 second club was my favourite competition, which made me consider doing hand drawn animation more often. My favourite roles in animation are essentially polar opposites, hand drawn animation and CG rigging, my plan at the moment is to pursue both of them, I don’t think this is too ambitious because I am very passionate about both and love to learn about both of these practices.

In line with this subject, for 11 second club I did one hand drawn animation and for another submission I made the models and rigs and another member of the class animated it. Although this is still the individual task i believe this was an intuitive and professional way to approach this submission. This way we both gain experience in the area we want to specialize in and also doing the bits we are best at will make the final animation better because we each stuck to what we’re best at. If a storyboarder or set designer was making the rigs, the rigs would not be a good standard and damage the rest of the project.

For the codechef competition I didn’t really know much about programming before entering the competition but I realized that this was the best way to learn, through reflective practice. After the competition I used this new developing skill when rigging character, for example I used programming to help with my COP practical rig and it has really opened up more complex rigging solutions for me.

For the loopdeloop competition, I submitted twice and both were 2d photoshop animations. In my opinions these were my weakest entries, this is because I am not a big fan of this medium and have little interest in it. At least these entries made me realize to focus on the areas I am best at and have the most interest in. I believe these things go together, Passion and being successful at something, but the passion always comes first, the success is a side effect.

The second study task was to work collaboratively with students from other courses. Unfortunately, the execution and organisation of this was awful but I made the best of it and found a group with 2 other animation students and an illustration student. Me and the 2 other animators worked hard on this brief and learnt a lot from it. The illustration student hardly did anything compared to us but it didn’t matter because we’re not here to do the minimal amount of work. We’re here to learn as much as we can.

The brief we chose was the thirsty planet brief, we chose this one because it seemed like it was for a good cause. We decided to do a cut out animation because this would suit the branding and message of the product. One of the main things I learnt from this project was in a way unrelated to this project, it was that rigging is quite common in general animation practice, not just 3d animation. I realised this when making the card puppets and thinking about the requirements of how they need to move and thinking about how I am going to implement that into the puppet with the tools I have available to me. This is exactly the same process as making a rig for 3d animation.

I also learnt a lot about personality of the characters. In the first scene we animated together, I was animating the baby elephant, as I was animating I realised who the character was and based on this how I would make it move. I think this is very important because to make a character animation believable, the animator needs to have an understanding of who the character is and their personality.

In conclusion I really enjoyed this module and learnt a lot from it, to improve I would elaborate on the things I have learnt such as considering the character’s personality before animating them and extending my knowledge of rigging by learning as much as I can and putting it into practice. I found working collaboratively really enjoyable and much better than working alone because different people have different skillsets and the project required lots of different skillsets which we had when we combined our skillsets.