Week 11

This week our team messaged each other and mention that we should probably meet one of the days and go over our different animations that we have done. We never end up meeting which was really annoying because I was confused with this group since we merged with the other group and I felt like I lost the design of the group and it was taken over from me. This always happens so I just had to keep my mouth shut. I prefer when you are able to communicate with your team and decide on everything as a team, but these new team members weren’t the best at communicating and instead just picked what ever they wanted to do.

I did another composition and colour design this week because I wanted to explore more into the colour since I have talked to Alec. As you can see it definitely has errors, but I have used a simple drawing a approach and wanted to play with some more of the colours.

We discussed even more and I have decided that I will try animating the design that I choose from the bunch of the designs because I didn’t really know what else to do because everything in the story board was taken by everyone else. I planned out to just try to animate the silhouette of the character that I chose. This is because we were all running out of time and my group didn’t rally communicate very well which was definitely a step backwards.

This is the animation that I came up with for a team project, but I was pretty much alone so I animated the characters hand going up and down, almost like swinging the sword. I did this to make sure that I am working as a team and contributing a little animation. Even though I came up with most of the story board for our group I didn’t really complain about anything that they were doing.

When I gotten onto photoshop I thought its going to be a normal challenge to animate the hand of the character, but I was wrong and it was nothing compared to animating a ball. I had to redraw the character multiple times for different frames just so I could change the location of its arm moving up a down. You can definitely that the body is shaking and its pretty simplistic. I definitely bit off more then I could chew on this one because I was having so much trouble animating it. This is definitely one of the things that I want to improve on and try out next time.

Some of the troubles that I had was of the photoshop and its layers because they kept moving and deleting pieces of the character, which made the whole process to long and difficult. I am surprised I came out with a result like that because I was losing my mind I am not going to lie. I want to definitely research photoshop more the next semester because its has more tools then you know.

I have also missed a part of this weeks lectures because I kept getting sick since the weather was really bad and I caught a bad flue. I have went over the slides at home and just asked my friends to give me some information on what the class was about.

I found out that the class was about our blogs and how can you make them look better for people to look at and just make them better over all. This week was also all about preparing and reflecting on the work that you have done in the past semester. The class has also included guidance on self assessing your work and what you should include in your reflection.

We also got reminded about other people’s blogs and by looking at them we can change things from our blogs and make them more pleasant to read and to look at.

Semester Review

I definitely have to say that the semester has passed by really fast and I didn’t expect it to end so fast either. I have struggled a lot for the first couple of weeks because I was not used to this kind of environment and being alone just made it worse most of the time. I have definitely tried my best to keep myself up every day and try my best for myself and my family because I do want to make them proud. This semester had thought me about so many things important when it comes to animation and just media world in general. From just designing a world to writing essays, it was definitely an interesting semester. Learning different approaches and then applying them towards our different designs and compositions was definitely interesting.

My usual design and art work station would be my sketch book and my pencil because I am used to drawing on paper and before this semester I almost never drew digitally before it was really scary for me. Throughout the semester It was really fun getting to learn about more of the applications like animate cc and photoshop. I definitely invested more time on Photoshop because I always thought that it’s superior to all of the applications our there. This is why I spent a lot of time watching video on photoshop and trying to learn things. When i started drawing digitally you can see that my work is not the best quality, but it is definitely my best work for the time being and I am really proud of it.

One of the challenges that i went through the semester was group work and just working inside them in general. I am definitely easy to talk to and I really like sharing my ideas etc when it comes to my work. I found out this semester that not everyone is the same and that some of the people in my group would barely communicate about our work. It was also hard getting to meet up because everyone would set a day to meet up and then make up excuses the day before and we would not end up meeting up. This happened quite a lot through the semester. What I have learned that there is always going to be people who might be shy to speak up and share, but I feel like I learned to give people a chance to open up. This is one of the positive things that I took from the group work is that I tend to take the lead a lot, but also making sure everyone gets a say in the group because I know how it feels to be left out.

I am going to be reflecting on myself after the semester is over and try to work on some personal issues that I have. When i sat down with Alec, he talked about what the second semester is going to be like and what are we going to be doing at the end of January. He mentioned that we are going to be working on software Maya, this really made me excited because I love modelling and I have worked with the similar software which is called 3Ds Max. I have done 3D work before so I am really excited going into the second semester because I heard we will be modelling a lot. That said, its a different application that we are going to be working on, but I am looking forward to learning another software.

Throughout the semester I had one major limitation which me not having a good computer and when I want to design something digitally I would have to come to university. This sometimes can be hard to balance with work.

The main point for my creativity was probably different games out there because I like to research their roots a lot. The same goes with anime because I have watched anime since I have been a small kid so I can always relate to the cartoons.

I really liked working with Euan throughout this semester because he is a really friendly person. He also communicated very well with me throughout which was amazing. He was able to joke around sometimes, but be serious at the same time.

The main design reason for the designs choices were that I know this game called Lineage 2 and its very similar when it comes to things like ice, crystals, elements, materials etc. It inspired me to draw and design multiple ideas. I would always look back at lineage 2 for design ideas and help.

The final outcomes for the semester I have used a lot of Photoshop to produce a lot of the work. It was really hard at the start of week 5 when I started using Photoshop. It was definitely a learning experience for me throughout and I am willing to extend that research next semester.

I am really happy with my final outcomes for my designs and animation because I did run into some trouble on the way, but I didn’t let that stop me. I want to be able to animate better and learn more about timing and usage of time when it comes to animating. So I will be definitely working more on my animation skills later on in the year because I want to build some of the muscle memory.

If I end up having a little more time through the break I will be revisiting some of the topics that we have worked on for the past semester. I really want to revisit Photoshop and animating on it because I definitely want to improve my animations and the flow of them. I also want to explore character creation more and the detailing of the characters. I am really excited for that since I would want to design characters and buildings inside games one day.