Creation Phase Reflection

Saturday, October 27, 2012

1.     Do you follow your plan or specifications? Do you have to change your plan or specifications? Why?

Yes I did follow my design specifications where the hand movements to be used in the actual animations are noted at the end of each storyboard. Each storyboard, which will be turned into an animation, has at least 10 hand movements noted, by number, based on their order in Appendix 9 and 10. In this way, to this point I overall have not had to change my specifications or plan, however I did change my time plan a bit. Based on the planning that I created, I should have finished creating all my storyboards by yesterday, Friday, October 26. However, due to falling behind I had finished my fifth storyboard on today. Time is something that I really need to pay attention to.

2.     What has been the success and struggles? What could be done differently next time if I do it again or for the next steps?

The success has been that the storyboards have helped me picture about how each animation will look like as a whole once they have been created. The storyboards also help me visualize how the animation will flow as well as how I plan to convey the story and images through different hand movements. Something that was a struggle is in the drawing of the different objects and characters. Some characters, such as the cow, were difficult for me to draw as for some reason every time I tried, it never really looked like a cow, and the way it should have and the way that I wanted it to. So my main struggle was in the drawing, also in the composition sometimes as some frames have quite an empty background. Next time, I would add more detail to the storyboards, by increasing the number of frames per storyboard, so that you can see clearer the changes and additions made frame per frame. I would also study the anatomy or form of different objects better so that I can draw them better in the storyboard. One other thing is that I would work more to get a better composition, also to place things more exactly where I want them to be in the animation, for example make sure that an objects is really centered in the frame the way I picture it in the animation. These are the things that I would do differently next time.

3.     What's next? Do I need to change the next plan? Why? What should I prepare?

Next, I need to start creating the animations themselves. This will help me see how well the storyboard and planning that I have done actually looks and works out. Then I can create appropriate changes to the animations as I create them and get more ideas as well as become inspired in the creation. Based on this I do not need to change the plan. I simply need to put aside more personal time to create the animations and still conform to the timeline that I have created.