Who Am I Now?

Things I've Learnt so Far

• Photoshop animation.
• The Principles of Animation! I knew nothing about these when I first started university so I have taken time to study and consider them within each new animation I create.
• How to juggle multiple modules at once, I had done so in the past but not with modules that run throughout the whole year!
• This past year has forced me to present on my own to a class as well as show people on the big screen my work, this has been something I have had to develop and learn as I'm not the most confident person when it comes to showing animation; something still new to me.

Things I Want to Know More About

• Stop-motion animation
• Model Making
• Set Designing for Stop-motion
• The animation industry
• Animation Studios and the behind the scenes!

Skills That I Think Are my Strengths

• Determination and motivation to do my best
• Organising my time
• Researching and collecting information to inform my narrative/essays
• Staying positive
• Storyboarding

Things I Would Like to Improve

• Life drawing - I need to develop these skills to become a better rounded artist
• I would love to expand my animation skills into other mediums away from digital
• Social skills, meaning I want to be able to go out and talk to real animators!
• Building models for stop-motion
• Sometimes I get scared to try new things in case they go wrong

Practitioners That Demonstrate my Interest in Animation

• Nick Park
• Suzie Templeton
• Tim Burton
• PES
• Marc & Emma

Websites That Demonstrate my Areas of Interest Within the Creative Industries

• Vimeo - Best way to find shorts and current animations
• Skwigly - Current Animation News/Articles
• Animation World Network
• Pinterest - For inspiration and DIY tutorials
• Stopmotionanimation.com  - Forum that gives advice around different elements of stop-motion

Banana Magnet Task - Animation/Graphic Design/Illustration Mashup!

For this task we were put into pairs, medium sized groups, then large groups to work up three different pitches.

My first pitch was as pair coming up with an Alien Suit that turned a human into an alien by water activation so they could observe other lifeforms. I found this quite challenging as a pair as we only had two of us to come up with a whole pitch, however it did go quite well as our idea was chosen as the best for our table to work on and pitch to the class! Working in a medium sized group worked reasonably okay, however sometimes the message got lost between the different people, this could be down to communication skills.

Our final pitch was 'Dog Latex', which the whole class had to work on together and after seeing everyone's pitches in the lecture theatre I think our class actually meshed the best. My part in the class was to make the little dog animations at the bottom of the screen and I also complied dog footage that other recorded to make a 30 second clip to go to the final edit to layer. I feel as though I had quite a large role in this task and surprised myself at how much I threw myself in and really got involved. This task was really enjoyable to me and I preferred to work in a large team where there were lots of ideas being thrown around and so many inspiring people around me.