Reflection

From engaging into the Capstone project in late April until close to the end of this month, this term has shown me a number of things. Though this may not have seemed evident in the beginning, the capstone project has helped improve my time management skills, though in my opinion it never seemed to be a factor in previous semesters but only on occasion.This project helped me to incorporate disciplinary actions amongst the time management skills. When you work out a schedule, you stick to it unless you are ill, but if that's not the case, then you have to get accomplished all that you can in the given amount of times that you've set aside.

When Mr. Bezeau and I have our weekly meetings, I demonstrate what I have accomplished and I would ask if there are any changes that should be made. Most often when we do meet, changes are requested in one area or another, plus additional animation in other parts that may not seem so prominent, or that maybe lacking in quality and/or quantity. Since our first meeting back on May 3rd, his objective (and mine as well) has been to make something that carries the inspiration of some of Norman MacLaren's more abstract works except with imagery situated in amongst the abstract shape transformations. He liked the idea of having these shape transformations within the movie and had recommended that these transformations go along with a beat.

In terms of challenges, the lipsync has been the biggest challenge above all, because since there were issues of not being able to import the audio directly into Flash, I had to pinpoint where the syllables were and take notes. For example, between 0:54 - 0:55 --> EATH, 0:55-0:56 -->THLESS and so on and so forth. So with that I had to do a little bit of math. If I was 55 seconds into the movie, I would multiply 55 by 24 (frames per second) and from there I would work from that keyframe onward to the 24 frames after that one.

Other than that technical issue, the production of this movie was quite successful. The lipsync worked surprisingly better than I originally thought. There were no major problems of any sort that I had run into.

Having looked back at the entire movie a short while ago, I thought that something had been missing. For the longest time, I wanted to create something that was primitive, yet very effective. All of the imagery had no colour, so to experiment, I decided to add colour to most of the imagery. I didn't think it would make the imagery (and the shapes to the divide the tweens) look any better but when I applied all the different colours, it looked surprisingly better and so I decided to stick by it. From making a weekly schedule to go by, it surprised me about how much I could accomplish in one day (though, it did require the given weeks for this movie to reach completion). Over the summer months, I plan to continue experimenting and creating little animations in Flash in my spare time.