LAUAN403 Evaluation

At the start of this course, my self-taught animation skills were amateurish at best. Three months and twelve principles of animation later, I'm pleased to say my animation skills are now considerably less amateurish than they were before.

This module was overall both fun and enlightening for me. I found some of the tasks more challenging than others, interestingly enough these tended to be the ones that were more inclined towards drawing (and colouring) still images as opposed to actual animation, such as the character turnarounds, model sheets and solid drawing. I acknowledge that this is largely due to not coming from any formal artistic background and highlights something I will need to work on personally in my own time.

Something I noted throughout this module is that whenever I had the time to attempt a more complex sequence for the study tasks, it was more likely to contain flaws and be criticised and ultimately lead to being more time consuming than I had originally anticipated to make corrections. It made me realise that for some animations, less is more, but I can't deny that taking the time to correct the flaws also helped me gain valuable learning experience.

A good example of this was the anticipation task, in which I thought I could save time by rotoscoping a cat jumping off a table and drawing a dragon over it. I did not take into account the amount of time I would need to fix the position of the cat (as the original camera wasn't steady) nor did I consider the possibility of decreasing the frame rate to cut the rotoscope time. A few weeks later and not even halfway done with the animation, I finally bit the bullet and switched to animating a person hitting a hammer, which only needed a day to finish and worked well for the task. I now know for future reference, it probably will be easier to rotoscope keyframes rather than to do it frame by frame to save time.

For the most part I was able to finish the tasks within the allotted time, except for the anticipation task which caused a domino effect of sorts and set me back with all the tasks following it (thankfully I managed to catch up over the holidays). I generally felt like I may have approached this module with substantially more attention than I should have given it compared to the other two modules running alongside this and although I don't regret the hours and effort I put into my work for this module, I will aspire to even out the hours between the modules (and try to avoid being overambitious with some of the tasks) to avoid an uneven workload in the future.

I am happy to say that I feel far more confident in my ability to animate than I did at the start of the course and that there has been a general sense of improvement showing throughout my animations as they progressed.