How I have progressed

Looking over what I have done from september up until today, I believe that a lot of progress was made on our coursework from september til novmber. By this point I had done all the filming needed. The footage was editied and ready to go into flash animation, and we had made a start on our first adverts, although we had a few problems with having to learn all the tools to use in flash.

However, my downfall was the lack of knowledge on using flash and it seemed to take me hours to create the smallest of movement in the animation. Although our initial idea and method seemed like a good idea, it was taking too much time and by January, despite me spending hours at a time in the mac room, and laura working on the ad at home, only about 6 seconds was complete in animation.

I then took a break from working on the coursework in January as I had 4 exams to focus on. Once all the exams were over in Febuary, laura and I thought about what we could do to solve the problems we had incurred. We decided to scrap the idea of using flash as it was just taking too long and we feared we would miss our deadlines. We decided to keep our ad ideas the same, but change our method of production. Instead of using flash we drew the setting and characters and used stop frame animation as laura had previous experience in the method of filming, and the software to edit it. So we got our act together and I spent the whole of last thursday at laura's creating ad one in stop frame and making sure we followed our storyboard. And by the weekend, ad one was complete.

From this, i believe the downfall in our production was that editing in flash was just taking an immensly long time and I spent too much time focusing on every littile detail to make sure it was right. Although what we had done looked good. The reality of it was that we were running out of time. Using stop frame proved easier and we still kept to the original ideas and managed to create ad one in a week. I just think we should have chosen to use stop frame a lot earlier as it would have saved us a lot of time and stress. And I do think its a shame that we wont get to create a whole ad using flash as it did look really effective and different from other students work. But we had to be realistic and meet deadlines. With more time we might have been more successful with using flash.

But overall, I think as a team laura and I worked well together. We had good ideas and both wanted to achieve something a bit different. Together we resolved the problems that we incurred, and although our coursework didn't go as planned, I'm still happy with the way ad one has gone. We now need to nuckle down and complete the next 2 ads, but looking back on how the production of ad1 went in stop frame, we now know what we are doing and it shouldn't take much time.

This experience has introduced me to animation and I have enjoyed learning to use new software such as flash, that I didn't think i would. It has also showed me just how important it is to use my time effectively on work (have already started revision notes for other subjects as I dont want to get in a blind panic come june!). But from all this I now have a lot to write about in the evaluation of my coursework.