Cross Course Study Task

Due to personal reasons i missed the morning half of this task but the overview of what happened was that the courses of animation, illustration and graphics were all brought together and split up into groups made of students from each course. The task was to create a product to, at the end of the day, pitch to the rest of the groups going through separate iterations and versions, such as the groups being separated into smaller groups to come up with a product which is then practice pitched to the rest of the group to narrow down to one idea.

The idea that it got narrowed down to was an app that combined just eat with tinder, so food dating app called hangry Hi-5. We had to create a campaign and an advertisement video. The animators took on the advert as they were sequential thinkers and we came up with a storyboard and idea of food being angry looking on their phones and scrolling through hi-5 which penultimately means they meet up thanks to the app and do a high five. To make the animation in the fastest time possible we chose to do it in after effects with a class mate who has quite some skill in it animating and a lot of people designing rough sketches of the food characters. My role was to render them out and get them to our animator. So using a wacom tablet i drew the characters on photoshop saved them as png files and sent them to our animator. But i was working at a fast enough speed so i asked around and had help doing refined versions. Once our animator had all his assets i found myself going around and adding people to the google drive where all the work had collectively been stored for communal access so the presentation, assets and animation could be accessed by those who needed to send work back and forth.

Approaching the end of our production i noticed a different in the speed and urgency that illustration and graphics worked in comparison to animation. the assets being drawn by illustration and layouts being designed by graphics were being done with the intention to have them done by the overall deadline without the consideration of the animation advert. This made me more aware of the fact that when i work with an illustrator or graphics student that they may not necessarily be aware of the speed that is sometimes needed in animation so id have to explain this in a team with them which i wish i was more assertive when we did this task. On the other hand it did mean that the work they produced in comparison to the animators was more refined but this cost time on the actual animating.

Finally just as sound was being added to the animation after effects crashed! Our animator had to make the animation into more of an animatic. This was really frustrating as it crashed just as the deadline came. Again there was a difference in reaction to this from the animators to the other courses. Many animators were seeing if there was a possibility to save it while the others headed down to the lecture hall to do the presentation.