End of Year Animation Reflection

Exploring Animation

Takeaways

I learned many new skills during my sophomore year in Exploring Animation. I've learned many skills and tricks in how to animate using Maya and After Effects. I had no clue how to use either of them before this year and my first full animation was good for never using After Effects before. I also had to do a lot of collaboration with people especially during the final project. The final project was mostly communication and collaboration to come up with an idea and to plan out who will be doing all the parts. I had to take leadership a few times and some times someone else took charge. It shouldn't just be one person that is telling everyone to do their job and planning out what they want. It should be a group effort on the ideas for an animation. During this year I learned how to do 2D animation, 3D animation, special effects, and green screen animation, which i will probably be using these skills for the rest of my career at school and for my future job.

First Full Animation:

Final Group animation:

Strengths/Weaknesses

I have improved drastically this year in animating, I only knew how to do a little animation using frame by frame animation in Photoshop. The way I was taught during this year was way easier and helped me understand what I am signing up for, for my future career I plan to get. I just need to practice more on how to model and animate using Maya because Ive seen some cool and interesting things people do on it. I also need to make rendered animations look better. In the animation labeled "Ball Drop Animation", the animation itself looks good and the timings for the ball drop is spot on with the real thing, its just that the whole scene is darker than what it was before I rendered it. I need to find out how to make the animations look brighter and the texturing more realistic. 

Ball Drop Animation:

Future Use

The future career that I want to do is be an animator or a video game designer. Both of those careers use animation, which this class helped me get prepared for what I'm signing up for and established if I really enjoyed doing it, and I do. Next year, I am going into Animation because I want to learn more and get better at it, hoping to get a good scholarship for animating. I am going to be carrying the skills I've learned this year for the rest of my career. This summer, I plan to practice using Maya because I got the application on my computer at home. And I've always wanted to learn how people add special effects in movies and now I know, I wish to learn more on how they make explosions in movies. 

City Explosion:

Conclusion

I wish I started learning how to animate when I was younger and learned how to use the software. I enjoy animating and I wish to continue in this branch till I graduate high school. I'm wishing to learn a bunch of new skills across the years and become good at animating so that I will be ready for a real animating career.