Collaboration: Reflective Statement

I really enjoyed working as part of a group for this project, and I think everyone in my group was able to work very well together. I think working together with other people allowed each of us to use our strengths to create a successful outcome. For me, my strengths lie within the actual making of the animation, i.e. using Maya/ After effects etc., whereas as thinking of ideas and designing is more of a weakness for me. I would like to try and improve when it comes to designing so hopefully in future projects I will be more confidence when it comes to designing. We were given the starting phrase: 'When Not To...' and after many different ideas, we decided to develop an idea from 'When Not To Interfere'

My roles within the group were:

1. Producer - I believe this role was suited to me as I am naturally a very organised person, and so I was able to keep everything organised within the group, and do things like produce the Art Of document for example, which meant I had to bring everything that my group had done over the course of the project together which required a lot of organisation.
2. Graphic Designer - This role required me to design the graphical parts of our collaborative blog, such as the logo and header, as well as design the graphics needed for the actual animation (i.e. poster, dialogue cards) as well as the Art Of document. Although I believe that one of my general weaknesses is designing, I think that I am ok at graphic design.
3. Render Wrangler - This role required me to gather all of the final renders from everyone in my group, making sure we had all the shots needed according to the script.
4. Editor - This role required me to first of all when it came to the animatic- take the storyboard drawn by Georgia in my group and edit it into a video animatic. Then at the end of the project the role required me to take all of the final renders and edit them into a sequence which reflected the script and storyboard which were created by others in my group.
5. CG Modeller - I was in charge of modelling the gymnast character's assets, as well as a number of the props. I really enjoyed this part of the project as I enjoy using Maya to create objects.
6. Texture Artist - I created the texture for the gymnast as well as some of the prop's textures.
7. Animator - I was responsible for animating the gymnast throughout the animation, as well as some of the mime's scenes (the light switch scene & the end scene- pulling ropes). I am quite pleased with how I managed to animate the characters as I don't have that much experience animating, but I know that there is still a lot to improve on in terms of things like making the characters move more realistically etc.

A challenge that we faced as a group was settling on a final idea. At the start of the project we had a lot of different ideas, but it took a while before we finally had an idea that was good to go, and we could move onto designing and making. In future projects I hope that I will be able to settle on a final idea quicker as the constant changing and adapting of the idea in this project went on for too long in my opinion.

A challenge that I faced was after I had animated the gymnast's routine scene, I couldn't get the gymnasts feet to stay still when I needed them too. I was told that this was because I had moved and keyed both the main control and feet controls, when I was suppose to only move and key the feet controls. I didn't know that you shouldn't move the main control and so I had to delete all the keys on the main control and move and re key the other controls in order to fix the animation. This meant that this part of the animation took longer than I would have liked but I'm glad I now know that you shouldn't move the main control when animating.

In conclusion, I have really enjoyed this project and working as part of a group. I am happy that I was grouped with the people that I was because we were able to work very well together and never really had any problems when it came to things like communicating with them etc.