LAUAN504 Study Task 3 - Documentary - Conclusion

500 word Conclusion for the documentary brief project

Group work was challenging when confronting issues with production and certain difficulties involving colouring and texture. It was easier finding out about the characters backstory than recreating the historical aesthetic in the animation.
The design feature for the aesthetic of the animation was the biggest challenge in our project and the most important element.
We decided on a rustic historical theme animation to match the time period, and a loose style of line art for drawing and animating the characters. This seemed a great idea at first because it would be a simplistic relaxed style with no perfect character lining or detail, also without shading or lighting effects. The focus would be on colouring and texture, downloading unique tools on photoshop and retaining the same style throughout all our individual work which sounded good on paper.

Unfortunately we soon realised that this type of colouring texture and drawing for each individual frame would be much more time consuming than we thought, and one thing I have defiantly learned is that punctuation is vital in animation. Timing makes major difference in the end result and because all group members were suddenly busy with colouring, other elements of production and post production became limited and difficult to implement.
This single problem caused the our animation to not be finished and held up production quality towards the end and more importantly, group confidence and feelings. I found that members, including myself because distracted and disoriented at this sudden influx of unexpected work. This then reduced cooperation and effectiveness, people staying up late to finish on time and lack of coordination a few weeks in.
What I believe we could have done better would have been a better understanding of leadership and reasoning to achieve a specific and unacknowledged style or technique without testing, starting production straight away. If we brainstormed some more and experimented with colouring styles and technique then this wouldn't have been a problem later on down the line.

Using comical faces to portray more emotional scenes was an interesting idea to begin with, and I was a bit sceptical at first because it seemed a bit of a random decision, not relating to the traits of the animation and tone.
I felt this way because the examples we used didn't incorporate too much comical expression to convey emotion. Understanding we needed to break out of the serious character design for a more effective sad scene with comical faces made sense overall, a more comical character design might have helped to execute this more accurately however.

Overall our group was productive and had a good director and producer and I liked working with them. Specific ideas sometimes that I couldn't understand would be implemented into the final product without much discussion, and I suppose that is apart of directing when you have an idea and want to achieve it, but personally more testing and discussion can go a long way and even turn out more time efficient. This group liked to find the best looking technique but could work on he most productive technique, and I feel I have learned to perhaps involve myself in this process of teamwork and feedback instead of following direction and design.