WEekly reflective journal
WEEK ONE- 26/02/21
MAIN FOCUS- Context
This week, I started developing ideas and a presentation to pitch these. I think my skills assessment and research proposals went well because I started planning what I was going to make based on the skills and resources I already have and planning what types of research I need to carry out so I can approach the subjects I want to appropriately. I also liked how I presented my ideas in the slides document with images. I would have liked to create a GANNT chart. This week I have learnt about the process of creating this project and the importance of research and context in it. Moving forward, I’d like to set up a good timetable to help me structure my time effectively and help with my time management.
WEEK TWO- 05/03/21
MAIN FOCUS- Context
This week, I continued preparing my pitch presentation and presented my ideas to the class via Zoom. I also began some primary research, collecting evidence via a survey. I also created my action plan. I think my pitch went well, I was able to show everything I planned to make and why and what I wanted to research, with some exploration into audience research. This will all help me plan how my story will go. I’d have liked to complete more research into my intended audience and look into empathy maps. This week, I learnt how to create a GANNT chart. I found it confusing at first but soon discovered it to be a very effective tool to manage time in longer projects. This week went fairly well, going forward my priorities are finishing this context part and moving onto research. I plan to complete my proposal document over the next week.
WEEK THREE- 12/03/21
MAIN FOCUS- Research, Context
This week I finished up my context work by writing my pitch proposal document, making a research plan and I started my research by writing up the results of my survey, tried to contact practitioners and read articles about the key themes of my project. I think my PPD went well because I was able to put all my ideas into one document, summarise my intent and think in more detail about how I want to make my project. I also believe my research went well because I was able to draft some more story ideas through learning about various things I want to explore. I would have liked to be able to get a response from the practitioners I contacted but I could always get a response from them later on. This week taught me about the importance of research in a project and how it can impact your ideas and how you want to show them. I think this week was productive, I’d like to continue this later. My priorities are to get a range of research to help inform my project.
WEEK FOUR - 26/03/21
MAIN FOCUS- Research
This week I mainly focussed on secondary and experimental research, I produced a lighting study and did some more research into animated films. I think my lighting studies went well because I was able to consolidate a lot of learning into something quite practical, I think I'll be able to use the study as a reference for the lighting in my film. I would have liked to plan more research to complete over the half term because I need to get more varied research done to understand my target genre well. This week I mainly learnt the importance of contrast when colouring/shading. Overall I think this week went fairly well and going forward into the rest of the project, my priority is to get research done and start working on the story I want to create.
WEEK FIVE 17/04/21
MAIN FOCUS- Planning
This week, I mostly focussed on planning my film, having completed more research over Easter Holidays. I moved on to refining the story idea I had for the film, and started playing with character designs. I think writing my film’s narrative went well because I was able to consolidate all my ideas into something that made sense and tell the story I wanted to. I would have liked to have gotten further with my character designs and made reference/ turnaround sheets because I could cleanly move over to storyboarding next week but I think that spending more time on the designs isn’t a bad thing. Overall I felt like this week could have been more productive, but I’ve made good progress to making my film. Next week, my priority will be finishing the designs and starting to storyboard.
WEEK SIX 20/04/21
MAIN FOCUS- Planning
This week I’ve started making the character designs for my film. This has helped me progress my planning process because soon I will be able to use these to reference for the storyboards. I’ve found it difficult to think of what I want my characters to look like, because I want their looks to be able to tell something about the story and their personalities. I tried to generate some ideas by creating some Pinterest boards and then some mood-boards. This helped me collate some ideas which inspired some designs. This week I’ve learnt that some tasks will take longer than you’ve originally anticipated. This progress was helped by my research into colour palettes and character design experiments which gave me some good experience before I made the final designs for my film. Looking at my GANNT chart, I’m slightly off track but I managed to adjust it to account for the lost time. Next week I plan to finish up the storyboards and start animating. I have the apps and programs on my laptop and tablet for this. I will use the new GANNT chart and make to do lists every day to make sure I can stay on track and get the work done.
WEEK SEVEN 27/04/21
MAIN FOCUS- Planning
This week I have completed character designs, made biographies for them and solved a problem regarding the length of the film. Completing this work has helped me progress out of the initial planning process and I should be able to move forward with storyboarding next. I made many decisions making the character designs, I liked the strong use of shapes in my designs, and how it helps contrast the characters. For example, the main character has a rounded face but a pointy chin and the secondary has a more harsh jawline. With feedback from teachers, I realised that my narrative could be quite long and ambitious to make so I acted out the sequence with a sibling to see how long it would take. This helped plan out how I could animate as much of the sequence as possible. I also struggled with motivation and getting productive and had to change my action plan to my adjusting goals and time frame. I had originally planned to have started storyboarding by now but haven’t as the planning and research process was more intensive than I initially planned for and this has been slightly discouraging and harmed my motivation to get on with production work, resulting in a work lag. I’ve combatted this by focusing on what I have gotten done and adjusted my plans to be more realistic with what I plan to make. I made a flowchart detailing what I plan to animate now and maybe what to move on to given enough time. This has taught me to be more realistic with how you plan and that adjusting your initial ideas and intention is okay and can benefit your workflow by making us more flexible. I also managed to get more experience with character design, I’ve designed many characters before but never with the intent of animating a short film for, so I had to really think about how I could simplify my designs to make them easy to animate with. I learned that shapes are very important to portraying lots about a character, Apollo has a good mix of harsh, angular lines and swooping curves, giving him a more androgynous look, making him look both masculine, whilst very youthful and pretty. These design decisions were highly influenced by the moodboards and my colour palette experiments, which I used my knowledge from to help compare and contrast the characters, Apollo was mostly cool and Audrey was mostly warm. I wanted these colours and designs to reflect certain internet personalities and subcultures. Like Audrey dressed in more alternative aesthetic clothing popular on social media helps signal to the audience that she is a young person on the internet a lot. Based on my revised GANNT chart I made in my research review section, I’m mainly on track. Moving forward, my main focus for this week is to complete the initail storyboards and then make the animatic so I can continue forward with production. To make these I will be using the Storyboarder program on my laptop and use my Huion tablet to draw the boards, maybe using Photoshop or even Microsoft Paint to get more detailed boards. I want to make sure I structure my time effectively so I might make some deadlines to get some tasks done . This may motivate me to work towards them some more. I will also be using Trello, Google Tasks and my whiteboard to set myself daily goals and tasks.
WEEK EIGHT 04/04/21
MAIN FOCUS- Planning
This week I have progressed my project by completing reflections, allowing myself to evaluate how I’m doing and adjust my workflow, I’ve also applied what I learnt and planned from my problem-solving tasks this week to my workflow. I planned to set deadlines and targets for myself through Trello which has been a good way to motivate myself to get work done. By setting myself deadlines for tasks, I’ve been able to more easily plan out my time daily and see how long I have to do a task. This has helped motivate me to complete my shot list. I made a short list using a table on Google Docs and listed how I wanted each shot to look like and what parts needed to move, the layout of the shot, the lighting/colours and backgrounds. I hope for this to be a useful guide for storyboarding since I’ve already thought about what it should look like and help with production because I’ve started planning what backgrounds I need to draw and what colours and shading should be in each scene. I feel like my reflections this week have helped me realise that I have done a lot of work over the course of this project, and even more can be done and be improved upon, this has been really motivating and helped me appreciate some of the hard work I’ve put into this. I also think it’s helped me want to work to complete the rest of this as best I can.
The college experienced a Cyber Attack in the last week so networks are down on campus and communication with teachers has been limited to Google Classroom and Zoom class. This lack of communication has made it harder to talk to my tutors and receive feedback though I have been minimally affected practically by the networks being down. I have all my resources at home and can complete work out of college, however, the lack of getting out of the house and sociability aspect of going into college has been missed. I’ve felt more demotivated and have found it harder to concentrate being in the same space all the time. I joined my classes’ Discord server which has helped communicate news and information with teachers and other classmates. I also found it useful to try and spend less time in my room and move around the house a little more, a change in scenery has helped me to concentrate on work more. Additionally, I’ve been taking breaks from work and rewarding myself when tasks have been completed with food. Taking breaks to do something different was effective when struggling to concentrate, taking a little time to draw or watch TV was a good way of getting my mind out of the project. All this has helped me concentrate and motivate myself more to get things done.
This week I have learnt more about being flexible and learning how to adapt when things don’t go as expected and that there is usually something you can control in a situation. Completely unplanned, this was a good testament to the research I did about having an internal locus of control. By trying to focus on what I can control and do in situations that haven’t been the best, I’ve still managed to progress my project and find solutions to my own issues like motivation and concentrating.
Based on my revised action plan, I’m off track but by only a few days and I’ve completed work I hadn’t scheduled on there anyways. I think that I will be able to complete everything by the due date well enough. I didn’t plan to make a shot list in the action plan which had taken a couple of days to do, hence the delay but this will be a very useful document as I’ve essentially planned how I want everything to look like. Next week, my plan is to storyboard and draw the backgrounds to start animating. I have the resources available for this at home, I’m going to use Storyboarder for the boards and IbisPaint or Photoshop for backgrounds which I plan to reference from Pinterest or my own photos.
WEEK NINE 11/05/21
MAIN FOCUS- Planning
This week I have progressed my project by creating the storyboards and an animatic. Creating the boards has helped me plan out the looks of the shots and be able to see a rough idea of the overall animation. This has allowed me to gauge what works and what doesn’t and tell if what I planned in the shot list was a good idea or not. For example, I added some other boards that I hadn’t planned for in the shot list, like facial expressions in reaction to things that I thought would help convey the character’s emotions to the audience. In particular, in the section where Audrey is looking for information on the internet and does not find any answers, she tilts her head and frowns. I wanted this to convey that she was frustrated at this moment. Overall, making an animatic helped me to see if my shots flow nicely or not and will allow me to move into production, as now I know what I need to animate. The network issue at college has continued into this week, which has not strongly hindered progress as I am able to work at home. I have the resources I need to draw and animate my project on my PC and tablet but I have experienced the same issues as last week with a lack of sociability and distractions at home. Distractions like siblings and the dog barking at home have made me more susceptible to procrastinating. But generally, I haven’t been very affected by having to work at home which is good because I have made good progress this week in making the storyboards.
Other problems like being distracted by my phone and social media have been an issue as I’m easily distracted by notifications and alerts. This has led to me spending a lot of time on my phone instead of working and procrastinating. I’ve tried to overcome these by setting limits on my screen time on social media apps and putting my laptop/phone on do not disturb has helped in encouraging myself to not be so distracted. I’ve continued using Trello to set specific dates and times to get tasks done which has helped me make better use of my time. This week I’ve learnt more about being willing to adjust plans (I only made the first half of my story idea into an animatic), and learnt how important animatics and storyboards are for the timing of the animation. I was able to see that a shot that was held on for too long or too short would not have the right impact or the action could feel off and unnatural. My progress this week has been built upon research I conducted earlier on in the project, I was able to use Storyboarder effectively because I had practised with it beforehand, I knew a little more about what shots work and which don’t by studying some scenes from TV and film like my shot by shot analysis of ‘Banana Fish’ and ‘Versailles’. Based on my Gannt Chart I am off track by a week or so. I had originally planned to be done with boarding before May but am now approaching the deadline pretty quickly. Next week, I plan to draw the backgrounds and some assets I can use in the animation and then move on to animating my film. Time permitting, it might be useful to pick out a couple of shots to animate first that might be harder to make so that I at least have some good examples of production work even if I can’t finish everything. I could also change the style a little to take less time on each frame but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I have the resources I need at home, I plan to use IbisPaint to draw the backgrounds with references from Pinterest and use the storyboards as a layout idea. Moving to animation, I’m going to use Flipa Clip. I will make sure to use my time effectively by planning out what I intend to do each day using Trello.
WEEK TEN 21/05/21
MAIN FOCUS- PRODUCTION
This week I have progressed my film by producing background drawings and references for my animation. This has allowed me to move into the production stage and get ready to produce some animation. I’ve had to re-evaluate some plans of what I will be able to make by the end of the project. I originally planned to draw the 10+ backgrounds I had boarded for. But after drawing the first background, I realised that would be too ambitious and take too much time. I selected a part of my animatic to make, from Audrey putting the phone down, to the flopping off the bed shot. I picked these parts because they had some shots I really liked the look of and they did convey at least some of the story and themes I originally intended for. The network issue was still ongoing till early this week and hasn’t helped my motivation or productivity levels, despite being able to work okay at home. I have all the equipment I need at home, but staying home all the time has definitely led to more procrastination and lack of motivation. I’ve tried to combat this like I had started last week, setting screen time limits to ward off distractions from my phone, and using a daily planner to set goals and tasks has kept me on track. I haven’t produced as much as I would have liked this week, but did get some good production evidence with the backgrounds which I am overall quite pleased with. This week I have learnt that my initial plan was very ambitious and even my more scaled down storyboards were probably too ambitious as well to translate to the animated quality that I am really intending to do. This process has mostly taught me that being flexible and re-evaluating plans is a good thing, and now I think that my main ambition going into the next week is to animate a couple of shots, not the whole thing, to the best quality I can reasonably achieve in the next week before I am assessed. My progress on the backgrounds was influenced by the moodboard I had made and some research on colour schemes, which I used to pick out the flat colours. Based on my GANNT Chart, I am not on track, by a long way now, but my ambitions and plans have changed too. I mostly just want to get more production evidence completed and animate a few shots. Moving into the next, and final week,my plan is to continue animating and make as much as I can. I have the resources at home to do this, I am animating in the app Flippa Clip which I use on my tablet. I want to maximise productivity and what I am able to produce, so I will continue to plan my times and tasks using my planner and Trello.