LAUAN503 - Character & Narrative - Evaluation

Evaluation

Throughout this project I have felt comfortable with the amount of work being shared equally amongst the group and planning each section from, research, experimentation to development. This is mainly because of good planning and communication between all of us, we understood each others abilities based on style and worked out who should do certain roles and what would be most beneficial for our individual techniques, styles and preference, purely because we had the freedom to choose our roles.
At the start the group leader gave us reasonable tasks such as researching and designing props for environmental concept art, with lists of items to be created and designed, this was a freedom for our creativity and not limiting us to any specific roles or designs because we could influence the environment or characters design with our own style.
In the experimentation phase we each had a character that we had designed and influenced in our own way, within reason of the overall plot they would be animated in. That character was then ours to animate because of how much it would represent our own individual styles in the development and production part of the project.
This production technique worked well for everyone because it played into our own abilities and strengths as a group so we could produce something which we all enjoyed and wanted to create without any strict designs or plot points, it was a fun project for all of us.

What we could of improved on would probably be the managing of the work flow, because we originally had a much longer animation story which would have had the duration of one minute and thirty seconds. At the time we did not think about the amount of work that would have been required of us, and that it would have dramatically cut back on the overall quality of the animation, to stretch over the full duration in time. We had to cut the final story in half so that we could focus on the special effects, character animation and backgrounds, lucky our group leader realised this relatively early in the experimentation stage.

During the Post Production the audio worked really well and I managed to create lots of really well segmented audio sounds in the final animation, following each characters interaction with the environment and most importantly the magical special effect in the animation. These techniques, like many others which I had developed in first year, also walk cycles and blocking out colouring all applied to this project, proving a very efficient production of the final animation and I feel that I have defiantly pulled my weight in the group.

Overall, creating ideas and influencing on the final product by managing the group cohesion, when styles and art techniques link members to one another or oppose each other, is really important, nobody wants to be working toward something that they feel doesn't convey their own style and will always untimely be more work than pleasure and one thing I've learned is that animation lives in inspiration and energy.