This module has has been a great achievement for me personally as I had no knowledge whatsoever about After Effects and DVD Studio Pro and now I can confidently use the basics and am not afraid to try new things out. By designing work in preparation for After Effects, I have improved on my Illustrator and Photoshop skills and now show a certain degree of technical competence. In terms of the Movie Season idents, I wanted to keep them quite simple to be able to confidently use the basic techniques on the software, produce moving images and not over complicate myself by taking on an impossible challenge. I was pleased with the outcome, and was always fascinated when learning even the smallest of things within the software workshops as I have always wondered how it was done.
Developing storyboards and being able to jot down on timelines how you imagine your frames to work in terms of pacing was a skill that, again like the software, I had no background knowledge of and now have learned a lot about the importance of hand drawn designs and putting your thoughts down on paper before making the ideas digital.
My time management has definitely improved mainly due to asking for help and advice when needed, cutting down on time spent worrying, and coming across difficulties using the software.
The main reason for this were the software workshops which were always a major help to me and I am pleased that I noted down all that I learned from each session as it meant I was more independent than I thought I would be when moving from storyboarding to the screen. I also tried a lot harder than in the last module to keep my blog updated, allocating time slots through the week to do it and making sure any digital work that would be needed in the final DVD were always organised into one file, again cutting down the worrying process towards the deadline that I hadn't included all that I needed to. I live my life around 'to do lists' so it helped to always be writing daily or weekly plans to keep on top of eveything. It felt like a very long, hard module at times, but if I stuck to my plans, I was fairly happy week on week at seeing my efforts of organisation pay off.
My researching skills began successfully, as I generated a questionnaire and targeted it towards my audience, I bought and watched many films within my chosen genre and found inspiration for colours, typefaces, etc from their promotional posters, title sequences and dvd interfaces. However I am aware that I could have worked harder to creating my idents based on more of a 'style' of design as by just doing simple vector based graphics, it left me struggling for putting up other designers work on my blog that I could take inspiration from. This was also commented on in one of my crits, but balanced out by the fact that I 'had looked in detail at the chosen films and analysed my decision process well.'
I also think I could have worked more with the storyboards and perhaps come up with more initial ideas to have a wider range of them to choose from and it would have helped develop my skills even stronger and meant I had much more development work to work from. My reason behind this however, was that the five ideas for idents I did come up with immediately seemed to fit the theme and I was confident to re-create them on screen so I stuck with them and moved on, not wanting to fall behind on my weekly action plans. When going onto the next module however, I do want to spend more time working on generating ideas and building a stronger concept as I know that was something that lost me marks in the previous print module.
Five things that I will do differently next time:
- Work more with initial design decisions and concepts to have a stronger overall project to work with.
- Stop writing things down - visualise them and draw them!
- Allow more time for research and continue to do so until the very end of the brief.
- Use the library more and research broader. I love books more than the Internet so why aren't I doing so?!
- Don't be afraid to ask for advice outside of crit times.
Grading myself on the following areas:
(5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor)
Attendance 4
Punctuality 4
Motivation 4
Commitment 4
Quantity of work produced 3
Quality of work produced 3
Contribution to the group 3
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