Premise: Reflective Statement

For this project I really tried to push myself to create the basic of the work that I will be doing in year 3, this included working more on the character designs, and not just going with my first drawing or idea but going back and improving it, along with doing things that I have shied away from in past projects such as using a voice actor.

The idea for my project was to create a mythos styled story that would explain the how the stars come to be in the night sky with the main characters being humanised versions of the Sun and the Moon. The story would be told by a narrator reading out a poem that would tell the story, the story it’s self would also have a similar tone to that of a bed time story being told to a young child.

I also delved deeper in to my references so that I had more influences to look at so that I could create a much richer world that drew from several different sources. I pushed my self to do this so that I could find ways to help me understand the project more along with looking for ways to figure things out if something wasn’t working.

I felt that I was improving a lot with this project as I took on all the feedback that was given to me and worked to push pass the habits and problems that have plagued my work in the past. However, it seems that wasn’t the case to others and this project has ended up raising a number of red flags that I didn’t (or did) know was there.

One of these problems was that I was taking the feedback that I was given and not applying it correctly to my work. I was ever taking a small part of the idea that I had been given and applying it to my work or I was taking the whole thing and just adding it to the designs I had. What I can take from this is that I need to really think about how I look and think about the feedback that I have been given, this could involve me asking questions back about the feedback to try and get more information out of it.

This will probably help me to move on with my designs much better so that I am moving forward with my work and not just going over the same thing and changing it so that it fits in with the new information that I have been given.

My storyboard/animatic is another part that I need to look at to help me push the way that I tell the story along and make it more alive so that I’m not just using the same types of shots over and over again. This might be down to the fact that I’m still not confidence with the way that I’m drawing and so have ended up drawing the characters in the same way so that I don’t end up stuck on one panel working out how it should look. One way that I might be able to get around this problem is to put a hold on drawing the characters for a bit and look in to making a pre-vis with some per-made models so that I could play around with the placement of the camera to find new ways of telling the story. It might also help me to think about how the characters would move in the screen which might also lead to me redesigning them a bit more. There are also other parts of the story that I could be using a more abstract way of showing what is happening, such as not always having the characters on the screen.

However, this doesn’t take away from one problem that will be a bit of a personal hurdle for me to get over and that is to keep asking for help more and not hiding myself away while I work. This habit is rooted deep into my head from my school days and has lead me to believe that I would start to become a bother to people if I kept asking for help and don’t focus on the work myself. I need to get out of doing this so that my work can improve and so that I can get a better understanding of what I need to work on next.

By getting over this I can plan out my work better and set small goals for myself such as to when I need to get things done and finished by. Over the summer break I do plan on looking back at my work and trying to fix where it is that I’m going wrong and to learn new ways of working so that I can create the best quality work that I can. Overall, I can clearly see where I need to improve and how it will help me in my 3rd year along as well as in years to come.