Applied Audio Practice Evalutation
Over the last couple of months both Safiyah and myself have been working in a group together to produce a short animation to the song Schadenfreude from the musical Avenue Q. However I found this project helped me to understand more than just the concept of Audio within the assignment. I was able to realise my strengths and weaknesses and have tried to overcome the weaknesses that have appeared before me.
When the Assignment was first handed out I had no idea of what I wanted to do let alone whether or not I wanted to be in a group. However when it came to actually deciding what I was going to do Safiyah and I both exchanged ideas and realised that our ideas were practically the same. Which is why we decided to join as a pair and work together on the assignment. We both had our different strengths and weaknesses, my strength was formulating and making a coherent reflective journal whereas that is Safiyah’s weakness. However I felt like that was making Saf have a very large amount of work to do by giving her the animation work which is why I produced the storyboard for the animation and looked into various tutorials we would need for this animation to try and ease the workload off Saf. If we were to have the chance to repeat this assignment again I would help more with the animation however we felt that if we mixed the two different drawing styles together it would overpower the animation. Which would cause people to start questioning about the varying art styles, rather than paying attention to the audio which was driving the animation instead. I also feel that I should have set myself a strict timetable of uploading any information or data onto the blog or reflective journal. As I found that despite knowing that the animation was being worked on and that Safiyah and myself was working constantly, there was no evidence of that for certain times. So those are some of the things that I would change if I was to repeat this assignment again.
However things that I thought worked well was mainly the communication between myself and my partner especially because of the distance between our houses. We made sure to find a common meeting point which was the University and met there, discussing our ideas and constantly giving each other feedback. We had a basic timetable that we were working along but nothing definitive, which meant that there were quite a few occasions where we would fall behind on some things.
When we first started we were able to jump straight in with the designs of characters, scenes, storyboards etc which meant we could start the animating stage early on. However we both realised that we shared a common flaw or weakness with these sort of assignments, which is researching and evaluating how relevant a piece of research would be for our project. We were both strong when it came to concepts, design etc that we had let the more vocational side of the assignment slip which is when I had to step back from the animating side of things and try to work on improving my weakness of commenting on and evaluating pieces of research we had found which was mainly music videos from various artists.
As a pair I believe we worked rather well because of we had the strong communication between each other throughout the entire time period. However I feel that the project could have been better if we had worked with other people or was allowed another person within the group as we would have had enough time to focus on experimenting with various pieces of audio which we could then incorporate into the animation. However due to time restrictions we had to cut down some of our experimenting times along with our producing times. Which meant that we were not able to create an animation that would last for the entire duration of the song. If we were to have a bit longer I feel that we would be able to full achieve what we set out to do within our proposal, instead of only barely managing to achieve it. Which is how I personally feel.
Despite feeling like this, I do feel that the outcome of the assignment has highlighted various things about my working strengths and weaknesses that I should address. It also has allowed both Safiyah and myself to learn various new things in programs we were not too familiar with such as creating rain in flash using coding among with other smaller things. We also attempted to lip sync the characters however we gave that up as we realised it would take too long, and we didn’t feel like we had the knowledge to make it flow together properly.
~Jade
