Blog Ten- Final Reflection

Personal Reflection

Starting production has been such a crazy, fun, and enlightening experience, and I feel like I’ve learned so much in such a short amount of time! It’s quite hard to visualize what producing a large-scale project looks like, so this endeavor has already been such a great opportunity for us to get boots-on-the-ground experience for something that seemed so distant and vague in the past. 

I think overall, this experience has really strengthened my time management skills and drive to get things done within a short timeframe. Having other people not only to rely on but that trust you to carry weight for a project really gives me the drive I need sometimes to get the more grueling aspects of production done! On top of that, I feel like even in this short amount of time I have also really rounded out my skills and tried a lot of things for the first time. Specifically, I gained a lot of knowledge on sotrybarding and story development. I didn’t take Professor Cooks class on story, so taking part in materializing the full story for this production has really served as a great crash course for me in story development. I illustrate normally, so it was a big challenge to pump out a bunch of sketchy drawings for the world to see in a reel. I was most surprised by how long literally everything takes to get done in a pipeline, and this was a really helpful revelation to have this early in production! Everything needs to be critiqued, tweaked, organized, and communicated, so its best practice to never underestimate a tasks timeframe, and get started early. 

Overall, I am the most proud of my work on the girls. I feel like I have been there for every step of their ideation and production, and I am so happy with how they turned out! They reflect not only my passion for modeling, but my experimentation and my versatility as a 3D artist. I am also proud of stepping up to organize production, even though I have had stressful experiences being in those roles in the past. Going off that, I think I get too in my head an anxious about the groups organization and workflow, so I’m sure I get a bit annoying and tyrannical when under pressure. 

With my strengths and weaknesses in mind, next semester I want to focus my energy on preparation and not catching up to keep my stress levels even. I overall want to become a calming presence for the group to feel comfortable bringing ideas to! 

Group Reflection 

I feel so lucky to be in the group that im in, and I am so proud of our progress, our communication, and how we handle stress! I feel like we all overall keep our cool in stress, and we didn’t have a single interpersonal issue the whole semester. When things get stressful, we really focus on stringent communication and task delegation so everyone knows what they need to do. I also feel like our group focuses on positive reinforcement, which I think goes a lot further than incessant critique. Going further on organization, I think its through thourough planning and frequent group check-ins that we stayed afloat this semester. If anyone had a question, couldn’t handle the work, or wanted feedback, there was so hesitation to get help, and I also made the group check in and talk all as one at least twice or three times a week. 

They way we delegated tasks really made sure that not only did everyone get to work on what they wanted but also that everyone had to “eat their vegetables”, and do the grueling work. That way no one was relegated to only rigging and UV unwrapping while others got to do more fun stuff, but also that everyone got to make work that they were excited to do and proud of at the end. With that being said, I think the work was overall spread evenly. I feel like there were only two people who did relatively little, but the rest of the gorup was more than capable of doing the slight extra work that was needed to pick up any slack. 

Overall, I think we did great at task management and pacing ourselves. I never felt insanely stressed or under a crazy time crunch, because we all made the commitment as the group to put out work consistently. This made it easy for us to pick up any work when people were sick, and allowed for a much more relaxing environment to work in. I do feel like we could provide a better space and time for critique though. We don’t have any means to anonymous critique or even a space for group critique, which I think makes it a little hard for us to give out true feelings and just let non-optimal work slide for longer than we should. That is just me being picky though! I love my group, and am excited to continue working with them. 

For next semester, I want us to continue with our kindness and passion towards this project, but also provide the necessary feedback for moving the project forward.