Self Evaluation

Well my work is complete and i must say i am happy with my final outcomes!
My original intention was to complete three idents which would be ten seconds each, but i was only able to complete two. Even though i did not complete my goal, i realized that i would rather have two pieces of work which were complete to a high standard then three which were only fairly good.

I have had an interesting journey throughout this project and i have learned a lot of things in which i shall need to experiment on dueing the christmas holidays. My main one is to be able to model and rig and character, i have found this to be the hardest thing through my time at Ravensbourne. I brought the Adobe Maya character rigging book which Steve said would be a great help, but even though i was trying the use the guide lines, i found it difficult as i was not able to read the book before hand. I am going to set myself some goals in which i hope i can achieve.

Since last year i think i have taken a big step with animation, timing in particular. I am really proud of my timing in my first animation with the sheep drumming. I thought this would be quite a hard thing to do as there was a lot of drumming to be done so quickly. When animating i first had the sheep reacting rather violent towards the drums, with his arms taking big strides. But once i played my work through play blast i found he was moving so quickly that you could not really see him hitting the drums, so i calmed him down as if he was playing a little softer which worked out better for an animation piece. I also done a test where the symbols were moving as he him them, but this took away attention from the sheep as they were constrantly moving up and down due to the fast drum beat.
If you remember seeing the video i took the audio from you would have realized that he had a rather big drum set with around five symbols on there own. I could have modeled a bigger drum set but there were other things to think about, such as, would i be able to do a lot more movement with a bigger set and would it take away attention from the sheep as there would be more crowding him. I should have made one extra symbol next to the main one as he is repeatedly one symbol throughout most of the animation which looks sightly odd.

One of the things i wish i had changed was the background. I had it this way because i wanted to keep to a black and white theme but right towards the end i was not to keen on it. I would have gone about it a better way. If i were to change it i would have made him look as though he was on a stage with a dark background but with really bright spot lights to give the impression that he was doing a performace. As i have really enjoyed doing this project i am thinking of changing a few things to see if they would have come out better than what i have already created.

When i had placed my text to advertise the black sheep, i was a little unhappy. Although it doesn't look to bad, it doesn't look to great either. I wanted to make the text look like it was being stamped on but i did not know how to create this in After Effects. I do not know very much about After Effects which was a draw back to me. I think the text lets down the animation a little bit as it just suddenly appears towards the end. This is another thing i need to work on in the future to make the text fit in with the animation smoothly.
Another thing i would change that i just notice was a spelling mistake, for the guitar animation, the quote is meant to say rock out or get thown out but it says rock out of get thrown out, that is something that is very important if this was a real ident.

As an overall project i am very pleased on how my animations turned out. I know there are things that i could have changed and if i had extra time i would have but like i said before i intend on carrying on this project through the christmas holidays, as i think this could be a project i can look back on and be proud on at a early stage of this course.