Collaborative Project - Reflective Statement

During my time on the course, I haven't enjoyed a project so much as I have this one, it has been an opportunity to immerse myself in a role which I strongly wish to pursue as a career later in life and was insurmountably grateful for it. 

Reflecting as a Director I felt what I did in my role was in the majority of a positive experience. I found being the director that a lot of decisions fell to me for progressing the project. The team around me presented ideas for how they interpreted the script and concepts, from which I felt were the strongest choices and most productive in terms of forwarding the team towards an accurate representation of the brief. I found myself on occasion watching the team from over the shoulder and advising on what I thought to be the most logical and true representation of whatever topic each person was dealing with at the time. I don't think that would have been possible without a team which understood the idea behind our roles within the project. To criticise myself during the project as a director I would have to say that during the beginning I didn't do well at speaking up in fear of hurting peoples feelings about ideas they put forward. It should have been my job to be decisive at the moment of creation and worry less about the team's opposition. After the process, I can safely say that from going through this the reason I was like that at the beginning was due to never doing it before and not wanting to ruin the friendship and cohesive atmosphere of the team. During the live action reference taking part of the project, I think I did a good job at instructing the actors (Megan Robson and Alfie Gunter) and cameraman (Juanjo Estany) on the best way to act. I focused on the silhouettes, facial expressions and timing in order to really drive home the perception of each character. I believe in all other regards I did my absolute best in managing and facilitating the team, defining jobs and making sure the project was in line with the brief.  

As a group member, I was always trying to be a positive as possible, commending the team on the good work and trying to work with anyone in a positive way to solve problems or to make decisions towards the project which they felt required a directors decision. I found communication was the most important thing of this task and regularly posted positivity towards the group in the base camp and tried my best to use it as a tool to rally everyone and keep everyone in an up-to-date loop of the project at all times. To criticise myself in this area I would have to say that due to various constraints in my life I wasn't always able to make it in every day to be with my team, I felt this lead to a little bit of distancing between myself and the group in a communicative sense. 

In regards to my contribution to the team, I felt as if there was always more that I could be doing, as if in my assumed role it was important to lead from the front whilst also leading from the back, never shying from work and always doing my best to take burden on my shoulders where possible to show everyone that if we put the effort in we would get something remarkable out. I found that as a Director I contributed a lot in the early stages because everything was script and story heavy. then midway I dropped back a bit because other roles in the more artistic slide came in, then near the end, I had more of a role again when it came to the crunch, during the final rendering, editing, and sound design. To criticize myself in terms of how much I contributed I always felt that there was more I could add, as a way to keep the team stress free and have more of a visually creative input into the project, I held back however because I wasn't assigned a role in the visual department, and through it best not to try and steal thunder from others. The process was about a theoretical team working on a project and I thought it best to respect the boundaries of my team. 

The only visual part of the project other than the original storyboards which I added was about 50 seconds of animation during the final short. I ran into a multitude of problems during it like loss of keyframes and numerous frequent crashing. I used the post-to-post style of animation as I figured this was the most sensible way to go about timing, I focused on trying to get the correct silhouette for each character correct and really tried to install the sense of character. I was a little upset however when it came to it because many keyframes which I put in were missing, and I think this was in part due to the constant crashing and losing my place, and also in part due to the lag which was constant throughout the Maya scene which made it completely impossible to get a clear playback at any point.