Evaluation

Christian said the other week that we should start thinking about an evaluation, and as I usually write it the night before the deadline as it's the last point of learning, I thought I'd start putting it together now. So here's a few questions posed to us in the brief, and my initial response to them just over a week before we round this project off...

What is your relationship to contemporary communication technology?
(I still struggle to answer this question, so I'll go for something cheesy like...)
My relationship is growing stronger everyday :)

What have your projects taught you about communication technology & what else did you need to learn?
That communication technology is a vast, constantly developing range of interesting subject areas that is rather exciting yet daunting to dive head first into. As I narrowed down my exploration to animtion, I found the history and basics of animation is important to learn and understand, as this helps in turn to understand more complex ideas later on.
I didn't really know anything at all about animation, I've seen plenty but never really understood how it can all be achieved, so everything within my project I have learnt.

How did you learn it? 
-exploring current animations as well as traditional/older animations to bring inspiration to what I want to learn, then reading up/asking someone about it.
-Making contact with current professionals/freelancers of different abilities and interests to get a wider idea of what animation is like within 'the real world'/the industry.
-Finding a technique/sequence I want to try, and either spending a lot of time just playing around on After Effects till something clicks together, or searching the internet for answers. Then if answers aren't found, ask someone who might know, a friend/technician/other animators.
-Self-initiated briefs, from 'make a plasticine man move in stop motion', to 'create a walk cycle', to 'animate to sound'.
-Reading up on traditional animation/clay-motion.
-Wikipedia is my saviour

Evaluate the effectiveness of your research & self-directed projects.
I've learnt that you have to be extremely patient and self-disciplined to be a good animator, as it takes a very very very long time. But I've also experienced the satisfaction when something finally comes together, no matter how small it is. So, as long as I've been driven by the urge to work out how to do something, I've found I've actually worked really well. I have struggled and been fairly unproductive on the odd occasion, but tried to make up for that by cracking on the next day.
The time management workshop helped me to realise I should plan what I'm doing and stick to it a little more constructively than just kind of go with the flow, despite how obvious it was, it was a good wake up call.
I felt my research at times got a bit out of hand, as I'd be looking at something on vimeo/youtube/wikipedia and then see a link to something else, and something else, and you realise you've gone off on a tangent to somewhere else you didn't have planned. To begin with, I felt like I might be being a bit lazy and I should get my act together and start working 'properly', but then I soon realised that it all counts towards research, and I often came across something pretty amazing whilst going off on one link after another on youtube. I started to note down all of the places I was venturing to note down as a bibliography, more as reference for myself than anything.

What have you learnt about yourself & self directed study?
I'm more than happy to continue researching and blogging what I come across, and how I want to work out how to do something, which I will then try out and usually achieve one way or another. But when it comes to making an animation from scratch, I've found I work better if I have a purpose to what I'm doing. I struggled occassionally when I felt like I should be producing something, and spent a while thinking about what I could animate, the topic, the message, the characters, the sound, it all gets exciting thinking about it til I have to commit to something.
I'm glad I've worked this way though, my self motivation for self directed study is quite strong, I just need a little extra push sometimes to know exactly what I should/could do.

How important was the process of getting things wrong?
I think this is important with regards anything you do, you learn from your mistakes. I learnt the hard way in after effects a few times, which is rather aggravating at the end of it all, when I've spent 4 hours doing something that could have been done in 30minutes... but it's all part of the learning process, it's almost essential!