End of module evaluation OUGD202

1. What skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

The main skills have to be learning and using Adobe After Effects to create motion graphics. I have enjoyed the challenge of getting to understand how this program can be used effectively. I feel my skills have developed quickly and I have been able to apply this to my work produced.
Storyboarding is something I have done before in my video elective so I understood the role these have in planning sequences. My own boards are rough to look at but they are extremely useful for getting a series or a sequence down on paper so I don't have to remember it in my head, so in that way I have used these effectively.

2. What approaches to/methods of research have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?

The research for this module has roughly been split between finding resources to help me develop my After Effects skills, and research I did into idents and gangsters that I did to help with my movie season brief. I borrowed a couple of books from the college library and watched countless tutorials on CreativeCow.net  to pick up After Effects skills, something I have found genuinely interesting. YouTube  and TV-ark.org.uk have been great for finding examples of idents and After Effects work. Out of 100's I looked at there were a few key clips I found which I blogged, these defiantly informed my work and hopefully that is clear to see.


3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?


The main strength I found during this module is that I enjoyed the process of creating work in After Effects. This is certainly a program I will continue to use. I do like graphics that move in 3D space and I have been exploring this for most of the module. I think its a fascination from when I was young and I had to go to an arcade to play early 3D video games, these seemed far more exciting than 2D sprites at the time but are now ubiquitous and have lost that magic to a certain extent. I wanted to re-capture that 'wow' feeling in the way my graphics could move.


4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these more fully?

I think my concepts were not particularly strong for the film season brief. I think getting to grips with After Effects distracted me from developing ideas more completely. I think now I have learnt far more in After Effects, next time I wont feel the need to experiment in the program quite so much, so I can go back to experimenting with concepts and ideas more. Now I know certain things are possible in the program it gives me a far more informed starting point on which to develop work, from this point I feel my motion graphics work can only improve. My DVD also could have been more, I dont think I had the will to learn DVD studio to the same extent as I learnt After Effects in this module, but I do want to come back to this and do more with interface design in future.


5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?

1) More planning, more concepts and more ideas worked out before I move into After Effects next time.

2) Better DVD interface design, again a stronger concept would have helped here, I think now I have done this once, I could do something far better the next time. This module has been quite an intensive learning experience, and the outcome of the DVD perhaps doesn't reflect on the effort put in. I didnt get on as well with DVD studio pro as I did with After Effects.

3) Try not to work on After Effects too late into the early hours, its probably not reflecting well on me coming in at 28mins past 9 with a cup of coffee looking knackerd. But than I never have been a morning person.

4) Stop fiddling with stuff. Too many times I have wondered 'what if I move the camera then bring in another spot light which pans the the left....' then another evening disappears! I need to be more disciplined with this as I could have spent the same time creating whole new idents or exploring a new concept.

5) Probably I wont do kinetic type again, you have to adjust and watch things over, and over, and over to get them to be effective, you get sick of them and lose objectivity. Also the pacing of the speech dictates the pace of the graphics to such an extent I found storyboarding these text sequences to be pretty useless, sometimes you get four words to animate in less than a second, that cant be planned on paper because you can view the paper for as long as you want, so you cant tell if something will be readable and effective in 4/10 of a second.