Thursday 14 December 2017

Collaboration - Reflective Statement

This project was definitely not one I was looking forward to as I'd heard about it from previous years. This may have been my first mistake with this project. I don't often do group work and I'm not very experienced in collaborating on such a large project. However I should have taken this into account from the beginning and tried to make it as easy as possible for myself but this was not the case. I'm not usually a confrontational person so this meant I would agree to ideas that I really wasn't happy about, but thought it would offend people if I was critical of their ideas.

I was asked to lead the group by Alan about halfway through the project. Again this is not something that I am experienced in but I did what I can to push the project forward. I took on feedback whenever we got it and applied it to our work. I tried to keep an eye on other groups' work to make sure we weren't falling too far behind. However I struggled with sometimes directing the group sufficiently and conveying ideas. Sometimes what I said would be ignored and the project would become confusing. This is something I was specifically trying to avoid but it eventually did become confusing where people were working on completely different things meaning a lot of scenes were set up differently in maya and we had different ideas of how it should be animated. For this we as a group should have definitely spent more time animating together. In the end I feel I took on too many roles and due to issues we were having and running late as we were it ended with us not having a finished project to present. If we had given ourselves even several hours more time I'm sure it would have been a lot more presentable but realistically we should have given ourselves a lot more time than that. This is an issue I had as well in sometimes being slow to get some work done.

In terms of Maya and general editing I feel like a learnt a fair amount and have improved with Maya. I generally enjoy animation and I am definitely looking forward to making a longer animation that I can spend far more time on and have more freedom over. I felt that I didn't spend as much time as I wanted to on this animation as there are many little mistakes I noticed. If I had given myself more time I could have gone back and fixed these.

I wouldn't be opposed to the idea of collaborating again someday as I think it is an area I definitely need to improve on and in the right environment I think I can work quite well in a group. While I still prefer working solo I think I could also enjoy collaborating again.

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