The Premise project has perhaps
been one of the most difficult for me in many ways, and I feel like, of all of
the projects that I have completed thus far, it is the one that I think I have
the most negative perception of. To begin with, when starting the project, I
had very little idea on what I actually wanted to make a film about; even
though I had thought about it a lot beforehand, I had struggled on coming up
with anything that I was enthusiastic enough about to create a short from. This
set me up to have little confidence from the get-go as I found this to be very
intimidating, and thus, I feel like it caused me to get off on a fairly rocky start
with the project.
I did end up spending quite a
while (at least longer than I’d have liked) figuring out what direction I would
like to have taken my story and working out a running theme among all of
the supporting cast. One of my main concerns about the story was that it wasn’t
quite ‘personal’ or ‘deep’ enough, and therefore I think I ended up devaluing
my project a little bit. I think that this stemmed from the mistake that I made
of comparing myself to everybody else - not realising at the time that obviously
everyone’s going to have different tones to their project – mine just happens
to be considerably more light-hearted and it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I believe I fared much better in
situations where I had been given a prompt that I had to work with (as was the
case with all of the previous projects from both first year and second year);
this time, I had to figure out something by myself with no prompts or anything
else to rely on. I feel like this is another contributing factor as to why I fleshed
out my story very late on in the project – writing stories is one of my weaker
points, but after speaking to Alan about it, I managed to come to something that I
think is fairly decent.
My opinion of my film also changed
over time, as well; at some points, I actually ended up hating it and wondered that
if perhaps I could switch it out for something else for the Minor project!
These feelings did subside once I’d worked out my story proper, and in the
final stretch, I found that I was actually very fond of the characters I’d
made, their world, and the story that I was making. I do not think that, looking
back from where I am now, that I would even want to switch out this story anymore
because of how much it’s grown on me over the last few weeks.
Time management is another thing that I struggled with; I had become slower when working, which made it difficult to get everything done (which I didn't). This meant that my storyboard and animatic both
suffered, and I am deeply disappointed in myself about the outcome of both. I
ended up rushing bits of what I did manage to get done, and I think my struggle
with correct pacing and camera angles possibly worsens this issue a little bit.
I do also wish that I’d gotten around to colouring my environment designs and
making some concept paintings or illustrations of the characters as well as
reaching the orthograph stage, but I think that, given what has happened this
year, I’m at least somewhat satisfied that I made it as far as I did.
I believe that many of my issues
with this project were caused by medical issues and the subsequent knockback on
my mental health, as it has ultimately set me extremely far back in terms of my
confidence and has worsened my imposter syndrome. I found that this got worse
throughout the project to the point that towards the final month or so, while
I have always struggled with confidence issues anyway, I noticed that my
already fairly negative perception of my art had progressed into becoming
incredibly embarrassed to share what I’d been working on out of fear that it
was not good enough and therefore I became extremely avoidant in regard to the course. Coupled with the physical symptoms that I have been experiencing, it
ended up having a sort of domino effect on the rest of my work, as not only did
I start posting less frequently, but it became harder for me to finish the work
as fast as I used to be able to (especially compared to first year!) and
I didn’t realise until much later as well that I’d been missing out on tutorial
time because I had forgotten to sign up to them.
I feel like, perhaps, my biggest
achievement of the project was the character and prop design aspects. And, although
it’s rather negative to say so, I am actually somewhat disappointed in myself for
this. I worry that I am relying too much on drawing, and I feel like it’s
rather typical of me to have focused very heavily on the characters. In terms
of something that I am completely proud of, though, I am happy with the way my
environment designs and colouring work for the props and characters turned out.
I also enjoyed working on the Careers part of the project (mostly the parts that
required me to use graphic design skills such as the careers and studio
research tasks).
I’m aware that the standards I
hold myself to most of the time are essentially perfectionist in nature and
that it’s damaging for me, so I’m going to work on rebuilding my confidence to
the best of my ability. I want to figure out how to enjoy what it is that I’m
doing again, and to actually be proud of things that I create.
I know that there was little I
could do to control the outside influences that made this project much more
difficult for me. Luckily, the COVID-19 outbreak didn’t particularly affect me
a great deal as I had the necessary software and resources at home to complete
the project, but the medical issues that I had to deal with were unprecedented.
Part of the solution to this problem, I think, will mostly be to do with taking
time to process the mental effects it’s had on me and working on how I can deal
with these so it affects my work to a hugely lesser degree, and as it’s an
ongoing situation, that if anything else comes up, I ask for help as soon as
possible instead of letting myself become avoidant and fearful of asking for
help.
If I could revisit the project, I
would definitely work on the story first and make sure that it was one of the
first things that I’d had completed and laid out for me. I would’ve also spent
less time on character design (or at least moved on after figuring out the main
two characters and worked on the supporting cast later) and prop design so that
I could have moved onto the storyboard and animatic much sooner.
Over the summer, as well as
focusing on freelance work, I’m going to put time and effort into personal
projects and challenges to try to pick up the pace again when it comes to
working and to improve my time management. This is, of course, going to be done
alongside finishing my animatic and storyboard, improving my concept art and creating
illustrated pieces, finalising all of my character designs for good, and
hopefully moving onto 3D work after making orthographs for my characters (I would
like to at least have all of my environments modelled by the end of summer). I
am very much looking forward to doing all of this and putting my best foot
forward in my final year.
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