Summative Evaluation

Responsive has my love and hate. At the beginning of the module, when we were informed to respond to a range of competition briefs, I was not ready to entre any competitions because I have no confidence in my work or animation not even mention the bad communication skills I have with other people. Since we all have no choices, the only solution to solve this problem is face it. I was only doing three briefs minimum but I started realised the benefit and the fun bit of entering competition and work with other people shortly.

The first brief I did was the Penguin Children’s Book Cover Design competition. I have never done a book cover before and not even read a lot of books. My original designs are rather complicated, full of illustrations with a tiny title. The whole concept changed dramatically when I researched previous winners’ design and found out that all the book covers are very simple, just a representable illustration and big title. It is a challenging brief as this is the first time I have a client and considering my own style would not be attractive enough for children, I tried with worked in graphic style. After this brief, I noticed that it is vital to know about the target market if working on a commercial brief that my design might affect the sells directly. My interests in challenging increase and soon I entered more competitions such as illustration competition Onform and International KYM Cartoon Competition brief. Neither of them have similar content or requirement so it is important to know what they are looking for. Onform is a weekly creative challenge on Tumblr, there will be a shape online for each week and it is our job to be creative and interpret the shape. We can only use black and white and the colour of the shape so that it is a very exciting competition. I regret not brainstorm too much ideas but draw straight away in Photoshop because I might came up with other great ideas but I went for the second idea since started even though the I am pleased with the final illustration. It is also an opportunity to have my work shown to the public by having a Tumblr account. I think I should get more diverse feedback from different area and social media is a perfect place for that. Since then I have been posting my work on Instagram, Tumblre and also facebook, seeking more feedbacks to improve myself. The International KYM Cartoon Competition brief is a brief that I feeling emotionally connect to. The title is refugee and it was the period when refugee has become an international problem and the brief raises the awareness of the issue, hoping more people could provide aid. I looked at a lot of documentaries and news before I started sketching and all the ideas came directly from the research, they are drawings of some impactful scenes. I used different methods to amplify the frustration and sadness refugees have by using heavy pencil strokes, cold and dark tone. From the first crit, I gained quite a lot of constructive feedback saying that those illustrations are very powerful and could really show the mood and atmosphere of the refugees. I think they success because they are situation from reality and I appreciated the impact they have and hope more people can care about the refugee issue.

Do it Ten and Loopdeloop are the two animation briefs I did for individual briefs. I took totally different approaches towards the briefs and hope I could discovery or practiced skills I have. I drew frame by frame in Photoshop for Do It Ten and luckily found that my skills are not rusty at all. It took about three days to finish the brief so I was quite impressed with the speed and quality. At first I animated the cat without any reference, which looked like a monster and found out cat would not walk with two legs at the same time. It improved when more research on cat walk cycle is done and I learnt the system rather than just copying directly from the reference and I am happy with the result. Loopdeloop is a bi-monthly competition and I was going to animate a simple animation that allows me to try out new rigging tool called Duik for After Effect. Although it took quite a lot of time to experiment the tool, it is a very useful animation method that produces smooth and natural movement of characters. I spent about fives days on the animation and I should have worked faster. I also receive feedback directly from Loopdeloop once I submitted my work. They pointed out that the speeding of the animation could be adjusted in different parts for instance speeding up when the rabbit pull out make up so it is more of a surprise.  Immediately I changed the speeding and once again feel the power of useful feedback that could change the quality of work immensely. I really appreciated their reply and my work looks much more natural and consistent after correction. This proofs that I need to look at my work from different perspectives by showing to others and not to be shy or worried about the level of the work.

For the collaborative brief, I work with Greta in animation instead. The reason for this was because I missed the meeting because I was ill that day and soon the holiday came and I was not brave enough to talk to any illustration or graphic design students, and Mike helped me grouped with Greta which makes me feel so relief. However deep inside, I understand this is an unavoidable issue that talking to strangers is the ultimate goal I need to aim for. I was not impressed with myself therefore I hope this could be improved next year. The YCN Orchard Pig brief is very flexible because there are not restriction or requirement but to show the company’s logo and core value: bold and stay rooted. Greta and me is a good team, we have our posts sorted out very quickly where she is in charge of character design and I am in charge of background. At the beginning we were planning to make a set of posters and a set of gif version of the posters but it has changed when we finished the poster design. We decided to go for 3D mascot and I am very happy with this decision because it can defiantly make out work stands out from the crow and suggesting ideas for cheap PR for the company. However, we only have two weeks before submission when we had this mascot idea and we almost rushed the work. Greta was making the model in maya and I was UV mapping the model after her. There were some problems with the model that some edges are messed up and the only way I could solve this problem is to select different loop of edges instead, avoiding the messed up part to reduce confusion of the mesh when unfolding in maya. The schedules does not allow us to remake a model so I decided to edit the flaws on the mascot in Photoshop instead and luckily it looks great on itself and also with the photo background.

Working in a team needs to take a lot of things into account. I have learnt to keep in touch with Greta everyday to check if we are on track also I am open for any suggestions. Try to be polite and respect others’ work. I think I could be a good leader because I love to keep everything organised and work with timetable, I also found that I care about group mate and encourage coming up with ideas together. After all, it was a good experience working with Greta and we did not have argument through out the entire production.