End of Year Reflection- Animation

Leadership 

One valuable take away from this year in the leadership guarantee is learning how to work with difficult people when in a leadership role of a group. While working on the final project I was the main one in my group telling people which parts they needed to get done and planing what we would do an when. Some people in my group were difficult to work with and I knew that I couldn't assign them as much because it wouldn't get done. these people also made getting filming and adding our special effects more difficult but it helped me learn how to be patient and how to assign work as a leader. We needed up finishing our project and even though there were difficulties the overall learning experience was worth it. 

Technical Skills

One valuable thing I have learned in the technical guarantee is learning how to use Maya. Last year for 3D modeling we used Google Sketch Up which is very different from Maya, which we used this year. Learning how to use Maya was a fun part of the class and it was cool to see how many different things you can do with the program and being able to make something from nothing is also vey cool to see. There were many struggles while learning Maya because the program can be very confusing and may start acting up for weird reasons so it was very frustrating. I had to learn it takes patience and also good organization but sometimes the program still would act up. This program was great to learn and the 3D modeling was one of my favorite parts of the year.

Communication

One valuable thing I have learned in the communication guarantee is learning how to ask good questions and explain a situation. Because we had to learn two completely new programs in this class and had to learn a lot of new things in the programs there were lots of difficulties and sings could go wrong very easily. I had to learn how to ask my partners or teacher for help but knowing how to ask and phrase a question is important to getting the answer you need. Being able to clearly communicate the problem and ask a question phrased in the right way will save a lot of time in finding a solution. 

Project Management

One valuable thing I have learned in the project management guarantee is learning how to stay organized while working on a project and keeping everything orderly so that it is easy to find. While working on projects there were often so many elements that it would get confusing and often times if you weren't organized things would go wrong. By learning how to keep my projects more organized it made things easier to work with and helped make the  projects go quicker and with less complications. I also learned that keeping thing orderly in storage is important because I didn't have a very organized desktop which led to some problems finding files I needed. 

Collaboration 

One valuable thing I learned this year from the collaboration guarantee is that sometimes working with a group is better than working by myself I usually prefer to work by myself but some of the projects required working in groups or getting others input in order to finish. One example of this is the final project which was much larger than anything I could have done by myself in the required time frame. I had to collaborate with the rest of my team and make sure everything got done and was done well.

Strengths and Weaknesses 

My biggest strength this year would be that I picked up on the programs pretty quickly and didn't have a whole lot of trouble learning how to do the things we needed to learn. My biggest weakness was I was to ambitious on some of my projects and took on more than I could get done leading me to not finish everything and have lower quality work. 

Conclusion 

In conclusion this year was full of a lot of new things that brought many challenges but I learned a lot about how to finish thing and how to work with others. My favorite part of the class was the 3D modeling and I also liked the special effects. I wish there had been more freedom in the class and that we had more time on some of the projects. 

The Present review

What I watched

I watched the animated short The Present by Jacob Frey. this short is about a boy who receives a dog from his mom as a present but he docent like it because the dog only has 3 legs. The boys disappointment is obvious but as the dog runs around chasing a ball he starts to like the dog more. The short ends with him getting off the coach to go play outside with the dog reveling that the kid has only 1 leg and must use crutches to walk.

Animation Breakdown 

This animation does a very good job with its story line and keeping the interest of the viewer. ease in and out is also used in this animation. Arcs are used make the boy and dog look more realistic. Since both the dog and the kid are natural things they will have arcs in their movement which is needed to make them look realistic and the animator did a good job of adding arcs and making sure their movements are believable and not robotic. The animation exaggerate certain aspects especially with the dog to emphasize the face that it is missing a leg but still make it look cute. By exaggerating the dog tripping and falling when trying to run it helps the audience connect to the dog and make it likable which helps the viewer also connect with the kid as he slowly warms up to the dog. One example of this is when the dog is chasing the ball and trips, it does a complete roll after tripping which would not actually happen instead a real dog would most likely face plant by adding this it makes the dog tripping something cute and likable not something bad.

My Application 

One thing in this animation that I have already learned is story development. The story did a great job of developing and concluding it's story in a short amount of time which can be hard to do. While working on my 2D story animation I learned just how difficult it can be to develop a story in an animated short and story holes can ruin your animation. A good story needs to have a problem, rising action, a climax and falling action all of which this animation had. If I could take one thing from this animation and apply it to my work it would be the use of exaggeration. The animation did an amazing job of using exaggeration to convey the story and make everything work and it is something I don't do a lot in my animations,

Conclusion

In conclusion this animated short was very good and was able to tell a great story through a very short amount of time and was able to keep my interest. I can take away from this short how the uses of exaggeration and arcs can make my animations not only more realistic but also more interesting to watch and can help the audience connect with my animation. 

The Present from Jacob Frey on Vimeo.

End of Year Reflection- Video

Leadership 

One valuable take away from this year in the leadership guarantee is learning how to step up and lead a group to keep everyone one track. During our video trailer project I was the director and had to step up and lead our group to make sure our video got done in time. I normal don't like to lead the group and it can be difficult depending on who is in your group but this is an important skill. Sometimes in life you will have to step up and be the leader. While leading my group I learned that sometime as the leader you can't make everyone in your group happy you have to do what is best for the group and what will help get stuff done. 

Technical Skills

One valuable thing I have learned in the technical guarantee is learning how video filters can enhance the overall look of your video. Without video filter the coloring and lighting can have a drastic effect in how your clips look making them not look like the go together and are part of a complete film. Te use of video filters not only helps the video clips look like they belong together but also helps set the mood for scenes and make the film more interesting. While first learning how to apply filters to my videos I struggled with chasing which filter to use and how to color correct it and I also thought it took to much time and wasn't worth it. After seeing one of my videos with filters on it I was able to see how much of a difference it makes and that the time is worth it and it will help the overall video.

Communication

One valuable thing I have learned in the communication guarantee is learning how important communication is to the overall success of a project. At the beginning of the year all the groups I was in struggled with communication and it lead to a lot of confusion in who was supposed to do what, this made the projects hard to finish on time and there were a lot of rushed parts. For our final project my group did a great job communicating and it made things a lot easier because everyone knew what was going on each day and we all knew what was expected of us. Or shortfall got finished on time and we got everything we wanted done finished due in part to our communication making things easier. 

Project Management

One valuable thing I have learned in the project management guarantee is learning how scheduling and having a project planed out before you start is very helpful and makes everything easier. When doing projects at the start of the year I wouldn't prepare for it as well as I should have and when doing my first entertainment video I didn't story board as much as I should have which made working on the project much harder and made it very difficult to complete the project on time. While working on the short film my group spent a lot of time on story boarding and planning out when we would shoot what making it very smooth from the start and helping us get everything done. Spending this extra time at the start made managing the project easy and helped us make our video higher quality.

Collaboration 

One valuable thing I learned this year from the collaboration guarantee is that although collaboration might not always something I want to do it does help get projects dine faster and get higher quality of work. Almost every project this year we worked with one or multiple partners and although it may not have been my favorite thing I would not have been able to do the projects by myself. When a group works well together it makes everything about the project go faster and smoother but the group working well is not a one person thing everyone has to put effort into it.

Strengths and Weaknesses 

My greatest strength would be that I can finish all my work in a timely manner and when I have things planned out I can get high quality work done in low amounts of time. I am efficient with my work and know how to manage my time well. My greatest strength would be sometime I am a perfectionist and will spend to much time on parts of the project and have unrealistic goals. This can cause frustration and often leads to having to rush at the end because I spent to much time on a single part. I have improved over the year because I have been able to keep a finished not perfect mindset allowing me to come back to things if I have extra time and not spend tons of time on them that I don't have.

Conclusion 

In conclusion I e-comm this year has overall been very fun and informative but I would change a few things. If I were in charge I would outline expectations and deadlines at the start of each project instead of halfway through, I would also show student examples that worked and didn't work for each project at the start of a project. There are many thing I did enjoy about this year including many film projects and how even when the class wasn't fun and we couldn't see why we were having to do something we knew everything would ultimately help us and had some purpose.

How to Prolong a Frame

Overview 

While working on videos sometimes it is necessary to freeze a frame and prolong it's time on the screen. This can be used in films to leave room for special effects, make things dramatic, or can add many other moods to the film. This relates to animation because when using special effects freezing the frame can be helpful and i recently used it while working with an explosive ending for one of my films.

Who

This technique is useful to both ametures and professional because of its simplicity but still being helpful for a variety of uses. Any one can follow this tutorial and find out how to use this simple technique to enhance their films.

How to

1. Left click in the project box to import your clip that you are going to use.

2. Left click the clip and chose make composition out of selected to get your project started. 

3. Drag the time bar to the part of the clip you want it to freeze at.

4. Left click the clip and chose time then choose freeze frame. 

5. Your scene should be frozen now and where ever on the time line you look it should stay as the frame you wanted. 

6. Now drag the clip you are using into your compostiton again so that you now have the same clip in there twice.

7. Now on the time line drag the top clip's (non frozen one)

timeline so that it stops where you want the frame to freeze.

8. the clip now should play up until the freeze point 

where t will then end and the frozen frame will continue for how ever long you would like.