First evaluation (summary)

 

Because of the abstractness, it was hard for me to convey my ideas – especially plus the fact that this is more of a parody animation. However, I had fun in developing the ideas since it is about what I like and I absolutely love this tv series.

There were many areas where it didn’t work out. Because I love this series so much, I wanted to showcase most of the supporting characters with a short story of their arc and so the animation became too long. After many changes, I narrowed down the story to the main character with references to the supporting characters near the end.

I had a few problems with the animatic. I worked in too many layers and folders (which I did not name) so it was hard for me to find which part goes with which. I tried to start again when I added colour but I remembered I had a few bits where I did not erase but instead painted white (since the background was originally pure white) and so when I added colour everything just became chaos.

This, however, gave me insight on how to correctly use layers in my production phase. I made a few animations (for fun) in my own time, but they were all under one minute and did not require too many layers. My last 2D school project consisted many layers and so my animation became extremely lagged. So for this project, I decide to section it into parts (so that each section is about 10-20 seconds) and then later use premiere to ‘sew’ them together. This way I won’t have to worry about the long loading times.

This was quite a fun experience and I’m SURE there will be new problems that I didn’t see coming in the future (next semester) and I would have to find a way to work around that, but overall, I believe I can make it work.

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Semester Two Diary Entry

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For the first week back, we were to make a schedule for the rest of the project. Below is my Gantt chart.

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For me, instead of doing the whole sketch of the entire animation, I complete things part by part. For example, I will complete frames 600-700 then move on to frames 400-450 (depending on the importance of the scene). However, there is a downside: If one day I decided that another idea is better for this particular scene, it would be very time consuming for me to go back and change everything (since all the scenes are already completed). This is a ‘personal’ project where I am the only one working on it, so it does not make a huge impact, but it is a different story when working in group projects. This workstyle is something I am trying to change since, in work industries, most/all projects are done in groups.

 

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Week 1: I realised I gave myself a lot of time to do the preparation so I started pencil tests early.

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Week 2: Everything is going well at the moment. Personally, I don’t work well with schedules (I’ve tried to make a schedule every time for my projects but I never follow them so I’m quite proud of myself for sticking to my schedule for more than 3 days).

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Week 3: Two things I didn’t end up doing is the layout of the exegesis and reference shooting. At this point, our lecturer didn’t say too much on the exegesis yet so I put that aside after the brief. As for the reference shooting. I slacked a little.

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Week 4: This week would’ve been busy if not for the lockdown. I enrolled in a volunteering program as a props operator/backstage operator, however due to the sudden level 3 lockdown the theatre is postponed. This, however, gave me more time to work on my project (since there’s nothing else to do).

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Week 5: This is the official week of production and I already ran into some issues. I realised I ordered some parts in the wrong frames – so some scenes were cut in half when they were supposed to be one whole scene. This wasn’t too much of a problem since I gave myself a backup week after the important scenes. I listed the scenes that I needed to go back to and continued to follow my schedule.

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Week 6: I finished a few scenes earlier than expected so I moved on to the next frames - this is to give myself a break after I finish the important scenes and also to give me some time to order the scenes I completed into a clean file.

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Week 7: I’m quite proud of myself for following the schedule until this point. One problem I encountered was that I (finally) drew the wrong parts (e.g. I drew frames 1100 instead of 1010), but this wasn’t a huge problem for me since I realised I already finished frame 1010. I completed frame 1100 even though it wasn’t on my schedule because this was part of the scene that I accidentally cut in half so I ended up doing more work just to connect the scenes together.

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Week 8: We’re in level 2.5 lockdown right now so my theatre work is still on hold. I managed to finalise the scenes earlier than expected during the backup week so I started to work more on my diary.

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Week 9: I found out that I really should’ve double checked if I made the correct layout. This week I discovered that I already finished a few scenes during my previous weeks (at least this is better than realising I forgot a very important scene). Then, I went back to check the scenes again just to make sure I didn’t miss out on some scenes. There were a few bits and pieces where I didn’t finish and decided to do them later because those were some scenes where I wasn’t 99% happy with, so by putting them back a few weeks gives me some time to finalise it. I think it’s great that I put the least important scenes near the end of the project – not just because of the timeframe – but it also gives me time to polish my exegesis and my professional paper.

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Week 10: I had to do a lot of adjustments this week since I enrolled in a work experience opportunity with Watermark Creative. We worked in a group of 3 and had 2 days to come up with an idea for the client. For an entire day we were jotting down ideas and working on the initial storyboard, and immediately after that I had another commitment at a theatre, volunteering as a props operator, so I had little time to work on my CAPSTONE that day. I knew this would be a problem so I adjusted my timetable before the meeting and during the days as I went. I managed to free up the entire day by doing more work the day before. I returned home at around 10 to have another meeting with the group before the hand in date tomorrow (2PM) to schedule another meeting at 12PM to work on putting everything together. The first pitch was on a Friday and I was exhausted from the condensed time we had to do this project so I decided to give myself a break on the day after (Saturday), so I moved all the work to be done on Saturday to Friday. This is when I found another good reason to do the important scenes early - just in case unexpected things come up, I will be able to bunch up a lot of the easier scenes together to free up a whole day to relax. I found out that I tend to have a lot of outings with family and friends because during this time there’s a lot of festivals and birthdays to celebrate - I normally do my work at night and sometimes when I come back from an exciting day with friends, I tend to get lazy and I just don’t want to do any work. I know this habit of mine so I always try to schedule my CAPSTONE project outside of those times.

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Week 11: There has been a lot of changes this week. Since the Watermark Creative work experience is only for 2 weeks, we had very little time to put our project together. For example, we technically only had 1 and a half day to prepare for the next pitch, and because of this I did not have enough time to work on my CAPSTONE project for the whole day. This delayed my schedule by quite a bit because I was planning to do a very time consuming scene in a span of 3 days. Judging by last week, I thought that we would have a similar situation where we would have limited time to prepare for our next pitch, so I finished a scene which would’ve took 2 days to do in 1 day (just so I can start my next scene earlier to free up a whole day just to work on the Watermark Project. In terms of the project, I didn’t encounter any problems thus far. I am nearly finished with the whole animation, except for some scenes where I got good feedback from. I decided to put this near the end (before the final critique). I forgot to consider this when I formatted my schedule, but I managed to fit it in.

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Week 12: following the schedule, we had a presentation this week, however after many debates the last WIP presentation was postponed for a week. This is actually good for me since I still have one last pitch for the watermark project on Wednesday. Since I finished the majority of the drawing for the CAPSTONE, I focused on academic writing and the watermark project this week. I went back to the treatment and moodboard as John instructed me and a lot has changed since the last time I edited it. Many areas were because of new feedback as I was working on the project, and also, after finally having a near finished animation, it was easier for me to write more descriptively for the treatment. As for the professional paper due date, it was pushed back by a week, then another 2 weeks after that (now the same due date as the exegesis). This gave me more time to work on those papers while I finalise my animation. The majority of this week would be me going to a cafe and writing my exegesis while drinking coffee until around the 16th of October. I wanted a break from drawing since I went through an intense 2 week work experience with Watermark Creative. After formatting the outline for the exegesis, I will be going back to my animation to incorporate the feedback into the art.

Week 13: Writing the exegesis was not hard, since I already had the majority of it done throughout the weeks before. My exegesis ended up having 4000 words (the word limit was ±3000). I sent my draft to my lecturer and asked if I inserted the correct areas into the exegesis, then I went back to fix the parts that weren’t needed. Also, after some more feedback, my lecturer commented that I had too few action in my animation, so I went and added a few more details and small background movements in my animation.