Evaluation and reflection of Final Year & Summary

Well my final year of animation is over and its been a long and hard journey through out. Felt quite like a marathon. There are many things that i am going to be taking on board and hopefully it will make me a better animator. Firstly i think working as a team and communicating is so vital and paramount that if you dont have these foundations as a working team then you can easily stray off and the work and team itself would start to collapse. so it is important that as a team you stick together, communicate and meet up as often as you can to discuss the progress of your project and how it could be improved upon.

Secondly i feel as though scheduling has been the backbone of this project. I think planning everything ahead is very useful and efficient because then you can work against time and plan out how long something will take to do. As long as you do that then you can easily meet deadlines but of course you can never avoid problems.

And problems we did have this year on this project. The primary problem was the constant switching over from different types of computers, we were using Mac and Windows at the same time and somewhere along the lines, the files got corrupted which then caused us problems in rendering the work. I think in future it is best to use the same working computer system rather then two or three different ones because then there is no continuity problems.

Sustaining motivation and multi tasking this year has been quite a challenge as i feel as though i haven't been able to put in 100% in some of the projects that i have been assigned to. I felt as though stress and the pressure of working towards a deadline got the better of me and i couldn't cope. But i learnt that organizing and balancing your work as well as scheduling can help you avoid this problem.

Overall my technical skills have improved a lot and i believe that there is a future for me in concepts and compositing. Even though i haven't been able to demonstrate my compositing skills this year, i have been practicising in my spare time and this is an area that does interest me quite alot. Also my drawing skills continue to get better and this is something i will continue to improve upon and get better. My modelling skills and texturing skills are competent and interestingly enough i enjoyed uv mapping quite alot so that is an area i will be looking to strengthen.