Five Things I Have Learned So Far
- The importance of design and pre-production.
- Visual language skills. (colour, composition and awareness)
- Storytelling through audio.
- Communicating ideas effectively.
- Discipline in practice.
The period between starting first year and the start of second year has been one of the biggest learning curves of my life so far. In terms of the technical aspect of the course, I've learnt about the production pipeline invovled in indistry and identified my strengths and weakenesses within it. From that I'm able to work to my strengths and organise myself so that I'm playing to my advantages when it comes to developing projects by yourself, where you have to in a sense, an 'all-rounder'. I've definitely imprived my visual language and awareness. Through different sessions and seminars in combination with the people I'm learning with I've aquired a huge collection of artists and practicitioners that I follow and admire as professionals within the creative industy. This is just one way in which I'm learning to develop my awareness of colour and composition within work and creative projects as a whole, which is definitely something that I feel has been greatly improved due to the number of considerations that have to be made when creating animated works. Things such as shot framing, colour, lighting and staging combined create a difficult task that I feel I'm getting better at working with. Something that hadn't really stood out to me until I started answering this question was how I've devleoped my ability to use audio to tell stories and design sound as a whole. Various projects have required sound effects and music that have to be carefully considered to make sure they compliment the visual aspect of my work. I have tried to be quite experimental with audio, just like the visual side of things and it's something that's still quite new to me even after doing it for a year. Communicating ideas through discussion and documentation of work has definitely improved for me. I find myself documenting and recording ideas on a regular basis through my blog and sketchbooks meaning I am constantly considering new ideas and approach both in and out of projects. In terms of communicating ideas verbically, through the amount of times we have presented ideas and work through crits and presentations as well as discussing work with other people, I feel like this is something that I have definitely learnt to a higher standard over the past year. Finally, I've learnt to be a lot more disiplined when working, in terms of my organisation and making sure to meet deadlines whether they are smaller deadlines within modules or final deadlines at the end of modules. Furthermore I try to go above what's expected so I'm not only relying on the module requirements to improve but myself aswell.
Five Things I Want to Know More About
- My relevance in industry.
- The infrastructure of the design industry.
- Applying research to designs more effectively.
- Combining different practices.
- How to conduct myself when communicating with specific people.
I found this question quite difficult to answer because I have a huge number of emerging interests and I often find myself wanting to know as much as I can about everything I undertake. However, something quite significant that I could like to better understand is my relevance in industry. So, what I can offer the industry I want to eventually work in and also how to get into it. Something that's very rarely touched on atleast in my experience is the infrastructure of the creative industries. How does the business side work and where is the money within it. Also, in terms of infrastructure, I think it would be useful and interesting to know a little more about the types of roles there are within the industry, not just creatively but other roles too. Something I would like to know more in terms of my practice would be how to apply research more to the design process that's undertaken within projects, and also how to research more effectively. I often find myself researching a range of topics and aspects that end up redundant and not useful, in a sense that is a part of research but it would be good to know how to improve the efficiency of my own approach to researching and how to apply it. I feel quite fortunate that on this particular animation course we have the opportunity to take on a number of roles and not only discover what we're good at but push ourselves to fill shoes and do things we aren't necessarily comfortable with. As well as this, I'd like to know how to combine different practices more, we often learn about roles in the animation industry but not so much other practices and how we can use them to our advantage and within our work. Finally, I would like to know more about communicating to people. Speaking to people about design and creative processes is new to me and it's not something I've done a lot of, so I think it would be good to know more about this specifically and how to effectively communicate and conduct myself when conversing with people in this field.
Five Skills That I Think are My Strengths
- Pushing myself to experiment.
- Creating 2D images.
- Idea generation.
- Organisation.
- Research.
Over the past year, I think I've established based on the projects we were given and they way I naturally attempted to approach them what my strengths are. Firstly, I think been quite good at trying to experiment with new things. Throughout my work last year I did 2D animation, and built a physical 3D set whilst also trying to explore different approaches to illustration and 2D image making. I plan to continue this as much as I can in order to diversify my work and open myself up to different styles and techniques. Next, creating 2D images. I feel like during first year one of my strongest modules was the visual language module which consisted a lot of creating images using a variety of mediums. I also think I am quite good during the pre-production stage at developing designs and imagery to set the tone of a project and communicate ideas through this. Idea generation has been a strong point for me throughout projects, I think I've been good at nailing down ideas and expanding on them throughout the course of the developlment. I've developed a lot of techniques to aid this from noting down ideas to sketching and conversing with people regarding my ideas too. For the previous year, I found myself surprised by how organised I was. I think it came from a mixture of knowing how much work there is to do and enjoying the process, I managed to pretty much get everything I wanted done with the modules that finished in the latter half of the year. Furthermore in regards to organisation, I stayed on top of things like documentation and deadlines for modules running parrallel to one another and managed to achieve good feedback partially because of my efforts there. Finally, I would consider research a strength of mine. I mentioned previously I would like to be able to use it more effectively, but I do feel that on the hole I have quite a good to during the pre-production stage of tasks and find that research in whatever form comes quite easily.
Five Things I Want to Improve
- Undertaking more personal work.
- Using 3D software.
- Realising my constraints.
- Presenting Work.
- Confidence in my own work.
There are a lot of areas in which I feel like I could improve but the five that come to mind include, firstly, understaking more personal work. Often I feel like through things like the amount of documentation and things like this we have to do in order to satisfy module requirements the work feels very inpersonal, and I don't think that working professionals would document the process quite as thoroughly on a blog like we do. Although I understand why we do it for the purposes of this. So in order to counter act this I would like to try to produce more personal work, or undertake personal projects in my spare time. 3D software is definitely something I'd like to become more familiar with, my only experience of it so far was when we touched on it last year but I'm aware of how widely used it is and I think it would be interesting and highly beneficial to do expand my knowledge of it. Realising contrainsts and not getting over ambitious is something that I hope to get better at this year, usually I set a highly ambitious task and have to reign it in more and more as a project progresses. However, it would be better to set a realistic goal and do extra work if time and limitations allow. Presenting work is another thing I would like to improve. I would like to improve the way my work looks visually, whether that's on presentation boards and the over all quality of the way something is visualised, and also take more pride and care in other areas such as my blog, sketchbooks and smaller tasks we have to complete within modules. Finally I would like to improve the level of confidence I have in my work. The reason for this is so that I'm more confident in my ideas, and also at talking about it. It would definitely give me more self confidence when working, and it would be nice to be able to talk to others about things I've done.
Five Practitioners That Demonstrate My Interest in Animation.
- Illustrator, Miles Johnston
- Illustrator, Kuvshinov
- Director, David Fincher
- Director, Alejandro González Iñárritu
- Cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki
Five Websites & Online Resources That Demonstrate My Areas of Interest Within the Creative Industries
- FZD School, Youtube
- Drawcrowd, Website
- Pinterest, Website
- IMDB
I have spent a lot of time looking for resources that educate me and in a sense entertain me, because they include information about what I'm interested in. Renouned concept artist Feng Zhu has a design school in Singapore where he teaches already professionals and people looking to become professionals, entertainment and industrial design. I've learnt a lot from him by looking at his work, but he also has a web series that he posts to Youtube called 'design cinema' that consists of long sessions discussing and educating people on concept art and the industrial design that goes into film, video games and other forms of entertainment. Another resource is 'drawcrowd', also founded by Feng Zhu this is a platform for people to post their work similar to a lot of art forums, but it's a great place to not only showcase work but view other peoples work as well. Pinterest I find is a great tool for doing research and creating boards to collect visual research together in an organised fashion. It has an almost unlimited amount of imagery and sources of inspiration but in itself provides a platform for research that I can't fault. Instagram is a social networking platform that consists of photographs and pictures, but I follow a lot of artists on their and keeping up to date with their work and the types of projects they're working on is quite insightful and enjoyable at the same time. Finally, IMDB the internet movie database is something I use to keep up to date and find out about films and the film industry. As someone who likes films anyway and watches them whenever I have free time, it's a great site for browsing and using for research. It has helped me out a number of times to find directors and cinematographers I liked for example, that have gone on to inspire me and allowed me to follow their work because I was able to find out who they were.
