LAUAN504 Task 2 - Competition - Conclusion

500 word conclusion on Competition brief:

This project was the best in terms of timing and group work effectiveness, the direction and work force was sufficient to tackle the obstacles we faced together, with great cooperation and production. My roles were background design, animator and beginning with basic character design, even though we didn't need a time table or production sheet, things seemed to be completed with good timing. Manly because of our directors constant feedback and acknowledgement of work progress, features I aspire and appreciate in a director, showing courage to achieve and time effectiveness. 

Starting with my basic character design, as a group we made it our goal to read up on creating character designs and art. I looked into silhouetting the beginning shapes of the characters from the chosen brief and adding small amounts of detail and adjustments, creating a concept that reflected my style and approach from the specific base character reference on the original BEANO comic.
Upon showing my basic design effort to the group I realised the director of this group wasn't happy with the type of character design, saying it was too real and not comical enough compared to the contemporary cartoon designs we were looking at.
A point I understand and proceeded to create even more simplistic deigns for, but this point wasn't as clear as I world have liked, specially as we originally planned on 'old school' approach to the realistic style character design of Billy the Cat comic books. Adjusting the design completely to match a comical design, achievable through realistic character design but not on par with the group unfortunately, something I understood and moved forward with.
Creating background design next was my biggest implement into this project and I received good feedback from my group and also realising that the other person on production was receiving the unhappy feedback from director about their backgrounds,or lack of, more just the same as what I had with my character designs. This was something we could have improved on, general group cohesion instead of just approval, when something doesn't work, explain why and help to understand reasoning, everyone has something to offer and we needed to explore this more.
The Animation area was easy in comparison to previous group work, because of the new software, TVpaint and in comparison to Photoshop Timeline is an absolute breeze to work with. First off the layering and timeline structuring and also colouring and tool save panels, it is just generally made specifically for animators and I understand why it is used frequently in actual industry production.
My role was to colour the frames and separate the work out with my team member on production, selecting each frame and filling. Although this was a very standard method of colouring and production, it was more importantly, time efficient, but what is more important, timing or impressive looks? I guess the middle ground, but even so we only used basic colouring and effects, hopeful next project I can experiment more with the media and application with a more relaxed group director.


Overall this group work was very 'on the rails' and was very effective because of it, but areas we could have explored more would give people their freedom in research and production and less pressure to follow a set of principles or guidelines. Even so, this was a vague point, because the general flow was very efficient as I have stated and generally must better than previous group work.