Animation Reflection

Animation End-of-Year Reflection

What I’ve Learned

Major Lessons

Over the course of this school year, I’ve succeeded in learning the essentials of animation and further. This year has been a great year for me since i’ve been able to truly show what i was learning by creating some well made and polished animations. One major lesson I’ve learned is to operate as an individual and mostly manage my time by setting goals for certain points in a production to be finished by and to also communicate with many of my other classmates and help them if they get stuck. Another major lesson i had learned was to use different mediums for animating since animating in one medium could limit you to making certain things. I had also learned to be very patient with producing big projects since one of my productions took around 150 hours to make. There was much that I learned and am still learning in or out of school.

Creating Projects and Challenges

This year, I’ve created many projects and worked with most of them to the end. The best of these animations has been my 3D human skeleton. This had been a huge challenge for me since I had little experience with creating custom objects in Maya. I gradually overcame this by getting familiar with the program and got faster and faster at modeling and rigging. Another great challenge I had to face during this project was that I wouldn’t be able to get any help from my classmates. Since no one else in the class had experience with modeling or animating in Maya, I had to look up videos and learn on my own. In the end, this project I created was one of my favorite since I was allowed to work for as long as I wanted and put as much effort into it as I could. The two other projects that I had been proud of from this year were our hand-drawn animations since I was able to try frame by frame animation.

What I’ve Learned and My Growth As A Student

At the beginning of this school year I did not know what it takes to produce a good animation. I had little experience with making anything in any of the programs we used. Over the year, I had slowly learned about the basics or essentials of making a good animation. Some of our lessons taught us how to apply our understanding of these skills while others let us do whatever we wanted. My growth from knowing very little to knowing a lot about animation has been amazing. I’ve enjoyed this year in E-Communication with all the opportunities it provides me. Over the year i learned of my weaknesses and strengths. My strengths are my ability to quickly learn new programs and new skills. My usual weakness is being able to meet deadlines for projects since I take too long on them.

The Year In Summary

In summary, this school year has been a fun and productive one for me. I learned a great amount of new things and honed my skills with older things. I’ve used and applied all my skills to projects both in and out of school and have had a lot of fun doing so. I have even begun working with real clients on their projects. With these skills that I’ve learned, I plan to further my future and work in fields such as the gaming industry. There is one thing that I wish I could’ve changed about this year and that would have been me going too far with a project and trying to make it too polished causing me to never be able to finish it by the deadline.