I think it's a bit of an understatement when I say it has been a while since my last update. A lot has happened since then, I made a lot of progress, had a couple of setbacks and last but not least: Failed my midterm. Not that it will bother any of you but I'll come to that in a second and will try to explain as much as possible. Maybe not for you guys but since this is a blog where I write down my process I feel like I'm obliged to do this for myself and for my teachers.
Maybe I can't cover everything because so much has happened. I could explain every detail and everything about my progress but that's not really the point of this entry. There will be some other blogposts later which include work in progress, test renders and such but this post is more about my midterm, how I handled things. Or better said, not really handled things.
Funny that after I stopped blogging my process went downhill really fast. I didn't have as many meetings with my teacher as I wanted to. I worked a lot at home and shut everything out completely. There were times where I decided to work at school, except I wouldn't get any work done and just talked with my classmates. I kept planning things for myself, giving myself deadlines but I kept postponing everything. Sure, I made some stuff, I got 3 movies done in total and did some testing. I was so preoccupied with testing new techniques that I didn't gave myself space to really create a concept and use those techniques to create something new. Instead I kind of used my test movies to form a new concept. I felt that it was a waste to throw away all of my tests so I build my concept based on the tests I had. Because of that my video's were okay, visually. But they had no content whatsoever. I just created things because I wanted to try new techniques and labeled it a "commercial" or "logo animation" afterwards. This isn't a bad thing per se, but for me it was since I was asked all these questions about the contents. They wanted to know what the context was, what kind of audience I had in mind when making this. What was my point of view on the whole thing?
The only thing I could hold on to was my drive basically. It's not that I made random stuff, because I started to create and test stuff with a goal in mind. For example, the Pong commercial was a test for me to make a transition from 2D to 3D and combine them. The Pac Man logo animations was about making 2D stuff in Cinema 4D and based on the fact that I wanted to experiment with making fluid animations. But that's it. There was no actual goal, there was no target audience etc. I couldn't explain the choices I made to them. It was just simple creating designs without any boundaries.
I showed my work at peergroup sessions and except for some comments on my work, never got any real feedback on the whole concept. No one warned me that this wasn't enough for the midterm. That I couldn't go on like this. I didn't know any of this at the time by the way. I thought it was going quite well, maybe a little too well. When I look back now I finally realize that the way I worked was everything but efficient. So, I did my midterm, held a presentation which was a complete disaster. When I'm nervous I tend to just keep on rambling instead of go blank and shutting up. So I talked about EVERYTHING, which made my presentation really hard to follow. In the end I got a red sign, which basically means that your work and proces are inadequate. As I said, I didn't really know I was doing anything wrong up until then so getting red instead of orange was a bit of a shock.
They mentioned so many negative things that I couldn't really remember the positive things they said. They advised me to have a talk with my tutor about the way I work, the way I see myself as a maker and the way I handle feedback.
So, the thing I'm doing now is looking back and slowly realizing what I did wrong. I'm busy with making some adjustments to the concept I already had. Have to clear things up a bit, write down my point of view and the context of it all. I want to have that done by the end of this week. Next week I have another appointment with my teacher so I'm slowly picking things up again.
He even told me today that I could still graduate in June if I wanted to so let's see if I can pull that off.
