Evaluation

This has been one of the most unpredictable if not craziest of college modules that I have taken in my two years here. While it has indeed been a rocky journey, it however does not necessarily mean that I got nothing out of the entire experience.

While I was made to enter one or two competitions back in my previous course in Singapore, I felt that I never actually made the effort to properly participate in any of them. I unfortunately did not put in enough effort when it came to the works that I had submitted in and was much more focused on simply trying to finish them and get them out of the way like I would any typical school assignment. This module, in a way, gave me the opportunity to rectify the wrongs that I have made in the past.

While it was not actually necessary to submit something in for all the briefs that I have chosen to work on for this module, I still felt that it would be most beneficial if I actually made a decent attempt in completing them all. It was a good way to practice my time management skills as well as allowed me to add new works to my portfolio and resume.

Another thing that I have learnt from this module is to consistently promote myself and get my name out there one way or another, I feel that the more competitions I attempt to take part in, the more recognition I will gain in due time. I believe that I have finally gained the courage to continuously promote myself and my work, while will definitely hold some form of advantage in the future as compared to simply staying quiet and remaining concealed.

While the module sessions were rather sparse, I felt that the peer critique sessions proved to be useful and eventually quite enjoyable, it definitely gave us the opportunity to interact as well as build up relations with students from other courses, which will most definitely be of use in the future. And most of the critiques I received were incredibly helpful, and while I could not actually apply all the suggested changes to my works (Due to the limited amount of time I had left before the deadlines), I still deeply appreciated what they had to say and took them all to heart.

The module was especially focused on brief analysing, more thorough analysing skills will definitely prove to be useful in the future, especially when I continue to take on various briefs from all sorts of clients. This module has given me that little push in better analysing briefs, to consider different factors that would allow me to approach that brief more effectively and efficiently instead of simply jumping right into it.

I chose the SYFY brief as my main brief for my individual practice, seeing how open it was as compared to the other available briefs, it gave me the opportunity to actually produce something that is much closer to my area of interest and studies, and it was possibly the only animation-related brief that I was able to uptake in the end.

Many changes were made over the course of this brief, many ideas were scrapped, many explanations were considered in hopes of convincing the judges of how strong my idea’s design concept was, and I honestly learnt from it all that sacrifices have to be made sometime, especially if you are to complete something in time. You will have to work smart, to choose the strongest points of your idea and focus on those instead of attempting to get everything done.

Responsive has given me a starting point to the development of my professionalism, the several briefs that I have completed has given me some experience on how should deal with certain situations in the future, particularly when it comes to difficult clients. I still have a long way to go, but I believe I have a slightly better idea now on how to write up a contract when working with a client or with another designer.

A large part of me struggled greatly with this module, as compared to any other modules in the past, but I always found myself reminding myself that to survive this module and its rather unpredictable curriculum and schedule, I needed to think and work smart (Very much like how we are meant to work around briefs and extract the points that matter the most). This was meant to be a considerably open module, and I suppose that was what made it so challenging in the first place.