My biggest issue in this project was my time planning, I got way behind and I was struggling to estimate how long it would take me to do things. At the end of the project I managed to get my time together and get my stuff finished but it was a close call. I've found that having a checklist helps me because I can see the amount of work going down and also it spurs you on to stay that bit longer to finish up your check point. So something to keep in mind for the rest of my modules is that time planning is key. I will use checklists and try to always have an up to date list of the things that I need to do.
This was a project I did well with ideas though, I got lots of them this module which was helpful as I decided to redesign both projects in the last fortnight. I think the late redesign was down to a mixture of time planning and over reaching with my aims. At first I wanted to have a minute long animation but I just don't think I understood how long it was going to take. Animation was definitely a shock to the system and my timing, drawing every frame takes time and then putting it all together digitally can take just as long. Although I learnt that if you want to get your hand drawn frames onto the mac you can use dragon frame to take pictures of your frames but thats only if you want to retain just the line work. Unfortunately taking photo's meant that I lost the paper texture I wanted to keep, but with the poor time planning I didn't have any time to do them by scanning which takes a lot longer.
With these processes I found that they were both very demanding and time consuming, I've never felt so stressed for such a prolonged time before but thats the challenges of these processes. My big issue with print I think was actually mainly due to my patience or lack there of. My first screens I coated too thickly because I didn't spend enough time scraping it to a thin layer, the second time I did it one was thick because I didn't want to have to clean a second trough for my smaller screen so I just used an over sized one. Then my prints didn't expose very well because I had scanned them in and printed them, losing some of the quality. I needed them on one piece of paper each layer so they lined up and I could do the whole set of prints in 3 layers. But I think I should have just re drawn them all onto one big piece of tracing paper and then I could have kept the line and texture in the scribbling.
There were a lot of shortcuts I had to take these last couple of days due to the looming deadline but it showed me that I can do some of this work a lot faster than I thought I could, and although thats necessary at this point its nice to know for future that I can save myself time with these things.
I think something that was strong in this module was context, with each one there was a reason for it, I kept trying to think where my work would lie in the real world. I think that pushed my project on quite a lot, especially animation because I made the decision for an advert and a song straight away and then the rest of my animation grew off of that idea. I've been trying to push an element of professionalism because something I always took away from a project last year was that my work still looked like a student work and I didn't feel like it was up to standard. By packaging it, it made me think that since it could physically be sold in a shop or shown on tv then its a possibility and that was good enough for me. I really enjoyed packaging my prints the most and tried to make it as realistic as possible. It also gave me a chance to try out the sticker paper which I haven't before, although in retrospect I feel I should have gone with the opaque stickers rather than the transparent ones because they lose some of their colour and vibrancy if they're not on a white background.
Things to take forward form this module:
Time planning: Do it! Use checklists if you must but some form of planning is necessary. If I don't know how long something is going to take then work for a little while and see how far you get in the time and plan accordingly.
Patience: I've sworn at a lot of macs, while using photoshop,dragon frame and especially after effects, but most of the time the problem is simple to fix. Stop panicking go ask for help if you need it but first take a deep breath and just look at what I've done in case it's an obvious mistake.
Screen Prepping: Thin layers of emulsion only! and make positives to scale and in position to save time later.
Reference: In animation good reference is golden and the frames where I used reference turned out really good. (The panning view in the last scene I really enjoyed)
Blog: Blog regularly. Don't forget it. Just blog a little each day. I think thats a do able thing seen as I ended up blogging while I was battling photoshop trying to edit my frames.
Self evaluation: I had two late points of redesign in this module and it worked out great but it would have been less of a stressful nightmare if i'd had evaluated earlier and figured out the issue then.
Spontaneous peer review: If I need to evaluate but i'm too 'into' the project to even see anymore then just ask someone to peer review it! Getting others opinions through out can help me catch problems that start to occur before they reach nuclear.
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