End of Year 2 Evaluation

Year Evaluation

The past few years studying my FDa in Animation and Illustration have been enlightening not just for my digital skills but also to help me develop and learn more about myself as a person.

Having already completed one year of the course I decided that this year I would try and take myself out of my comfort zone and try to find a new work process.  Previously on this course and on courses prior, I struggled to meet deadlines due to my messy organisation and poorly managed work flow.

As well as making several lists through each module to help me keep track of work to do, I also make sure to create several backups of each part of my work. Towards the end of 2014 I started experiencing a variety of issues while moving work from home to college and vice versa. Some of the issues which occurred are compatibility issues others were more unexplained but only occurred on the college macs. To adapt to this unfortunate sequence of events I made numerous copies of my work and distributed them across many USBs and hard drives which ultimately has helped me to save gigabytes of work.

From my experience in the first year I noticed that I found it easiest to work in Maxon’s Cinema 4D and to create 3D animations, I believe this was down to practice. Instead of trying to develop my traditional art skills (which were quite deficient) I decided to instead focus on my talents and create most of my animation in this software with the exceptions of software I hadn’t encountered before.

This obviously helped me become more adept with C4D but left me lacking in 2D art skills however if I was to redo this process I feel that even with practise, the result from 2D animation would still be of a reduced quality. Instead I would choose to focus on physical animation (e.g. stop motion, pixilation) as I found making models very enjoyable and always found the stop motion animation process the easiest to understand.

Out of all the C4D animations I produced I feel I was challenged the most by the wolf animation I produced mainly down to the difficult task of rigging a quadruped with a footroll, especially as the model itself was a low polygon object.  Due to this I couldn’t work out how to animate the character and eventually I had to move the wolf in a way which seemed unusual to me resulting in a subpar animation. Despite this tarnishing the animation overall, I feel I exhibited a variety of techniques which showed my knowledge of Cinema 4D and also refined some psychedelic techniques which I will definitely use in the future.

Rather than use complicated methods, I decided to attempt those techniques to further my knowledge and instead rely on more simplistic techniques to achieve a sleeker animation. For example, while trying to think of a way for the wolf to enter the scene,  instead of following my original plan and having it appear in reverse (like liquid) I instead chose to animate it using a strange paper folding technique I had researched earlier. This not only gave a more interesting aesthetic but also gave me an understanding of the process in full rather than using RealFlow to achieve an animation which would be formed from pure guesswork and luck.

It is from this process of wanting to understand a process completely which has given me the level of skill in C4D I possess now.

The Vice compositing module was one I found quite interesting as I had never attempted to produce commercial work and has no experience with compositing in the past.  Regardless of this, I still think that the Vice module was my most successful. With my newfound work plan I found the workload manageable and required little to no assistance from my peers or lecturers. In fact since I had managed this work so simply, I was completed earlier than ever before and this allowed me to assist my peers in their productions.  Despite compositing not being my primary interest in the creative industry, I still managed to find a way to make it interesting for me and prove that my work plan was an overall success, cementing it to my creative process for the time being.

Following this module, I went back to past work to build up my portfolio and to tie off loose ends with my work. This was a frustrating experience as most of the time once I have finished some work I do not return to it because it is hard to return to the original work flow and I am rarely satisfied with my work.

In this instance, when I returned to my work I found it far easier to work in Cinema 4D and I managed to get the foot roll of an earlier character to work more successfully although it was still at a poor standard due to the character not being designed with C4D in mind. Instead of wasting time on the trivial footroll, I decided to delete the character’s feet and animate it without them. This experience reminded me of how much I enjoy animation and how I have ended up blighting my own work by being over ambitious and aiming for perfect quality models and scenes instead of focussing on the animation.

 This realisation made me think about what I would redo if I were to do the year again and the first thing on my list would be to be less ambitious. Although I am very content with the amount I have learnt I feel like the more work I did, the more written work I had to do. This was very overwhelming and trying to balance so many aspects of my work (sometime multiple modules at once) caused me to be inefficient in my production and yielded both poor animations and also poor written work.

Despite not fully understanding how to achieve better marks for most of my work I think that non academically I have learnt a huge amount. I would say that I am adept in Cinema 4D and that if given a brief I could comfortably create something which resembled what the client wanted. As well as this, towards the end of the year I managed to organise myself far more effectively than ever before and independent work was no longer an issue provided I had managed myself appropriately.