Food for Thought - Sort of an Evaluation

This has been an absolute frenzy of an experience, for this module, I took up the tasks of researching into most areas (Such as the subject matter itself, sources of inspiration, title cards and sequences, animation and visual styles, etc.), scriptwriting, a little directing (Such as helping Cara out with the storyboards since it went through so many changes based on my vision and figuring out the audio itself), organising (Such as putting together the gantt chart), background designing and animating. I do not think I multitasked as aggressively as I did for this module.

Despite how incredibly heavy the workload and the little amount of time we had left, I still however enjoyed everything I did throughout, I have also gained a newfound appreciation for background designing and directing, and have also grown even more appreciative of other areas such as scriptwriting, voice acting, and of course animating.

Aside from that however, despite how the odds were against us most of the time (Due to unforeseen circumstances), I think my first time working with a group has been a rather enlightening experience. I do not regret quickly taking action when it came to putting together my team, especially as they have been absolutely amazing to work with this entire time. And I do believe that we will be happy to work with each other again in the future once this project has been completed.

I wish I had been a little more involved during the final stages of this project, I especially felt awful leaving most of the editting to one of my teammates. But then again, I just feel the need to be involved in almost everything, despite how it makes sense for each of us to focus more on our own tasks.

From the very beginning, I had immediately wanted to incoporate our interests into this project, and that was a silly, fun, back to basics and overall entertaining 2D animation that catered to a younger audience. And based on the fact that a majority of the animated documentaries we have seen after of a rather depressing nature, this felt like the perfect opportunity to work on something that was not just educational, but also fun and lighthearted.

It is always said that our works should invoke our audience in some way or form, to make them think about what they have just seen, and true be told, it always seemed to me that only shocking, depressing or disturbing works are used to create such a response out of the audience... But I also believed that, in this day and age, that more works should be created for people that simply want to come back to watch something that would entertain them, but will simply make them feel good, perhaps even comforted, especially after a long tiring day from school or work. It is understandable to make people think about certain subject matters, but I think it is just as important to make the people in the world feel entertained and contented to forget about their own troubles, if not for a brief moment.

I was glad that my team and I could work on something that was meant for a younger audience, something that could perhaps entertain them as much as cartoons from the 80s and 90s did for me. I still hope to work on similar animations in the future, and hopefully my old teammates will be willing to join me when I do so.

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.