Premise: Reflective Statement

Reflecting back on this project I have rather mixed feelings. One side of me is pleased to have taken an idea from the beginning and carried it through to this point, while the other side of me is dissatisfied with the results.

At the very beginning of the project I believe I started off rather strong with my idea being relatively solid to begin with, and I remained ‘a float’ so to speak. Yet, at some point I dwelled on parts that I probably shouldn’t have dwelled on as much. I researched a lot into character design as I didn’t believe I had enough skill to create a character that would match my expectations, which although helped, took up a lot of my time. And although I am pleased with the character I have created, I still haven’t achieved all the details I had been set to do. For example, the one piece I am proud of is the designs page I created for her blouse, I wanted to set every page to this standard not realising the time constraints as much as I probably should have.

Spending a lot of time on my character also reflected the rest of my project, shown by the lack background and little prop design that is yet to be completed. This was also not helped by my lack of idea for story. Although I knew I wanted a song when I first started out, I had never really considered beyond that point, so jumping in on storyboard rather late into the process trying various different experiments of how the story should play out was rather difficult. All I really knew was that I wanted to get from ‘point A’ to ‘point B’.

Although this was seemingly the hardest part of my project, I found it rather rewarding.  Overall the storyboard took me around 4 days to complete, which felt like a massive overwhelming task trying to fill 4 minutes worth of song I had written out. A lot of this time I spent just thinking about various things a singular character could do within a musical number, looking at and studying various other animated musical numbers to see what they had achieved. I think the main struggle for this was finding different things for her to do while also indicating some plot points while following along with the song. Yet I think I sort of did it?

This for me felt like my biggest achievement from starting with nothing to having a full storyboard. I now had an idea of what type of things my character would be doing and what she would now need for me to create in terms of props and backgrounds it was becoming clear. However, by this point it was rather too late to begin working on the smaller details, leaving rarely any time to create a full animatic. This was the biggest disappointment for me, the animatic has always been one of my favourite parts of the process, and something I have enjoyed creating in the past. This part for me really allows me to see what I have created for the first time, and I didn’t get to witness that.

One of the things I am most proud of is creating the song, although not in the full way id like it to be heard with it all fully recorded properly, it still conveys as much as I would have wanted it to. Having the collaboration project before this project really helped me within this, as I had to collaborate with an outsider to the course and really make sure I explained exactly what I was looking for and communicated that clearly, which I believe was achieved. Although this process took a lot of time working back and forth between me and Emma, in the end I feel like we pulled it off.

If I could go back I would have probably started with story first, just so I had a clear idea of what was going to happen within the short and have an understanding of the types of things I would actually need instead of spending time on elements that were not as important as I had imagined.  My plan from this point is to continue work on the animatic, as although a storyboard is great, I don’t think my true intentions will come across until I show what I have created with some sort of motion to it with the music. I also want to go back and fully realise all my sketches within my making of to get them to the standard that I had intended.