Digital Reflective journal #1

This week was mainly comprised of various workshops to help us improve our skills before starting the main project. As a result there wasn't any specific goal to work towards, but rather various mini tasks to complete.

An example of this was our drawing session where we did various observational drawings during a collaborate call. For this I decided to try and do the tasks digitally in photoshop as my digital drawing skills were always somewhat poor. Because of this I had to fight with the program at some stages but was able to finish the tasks in the end. The blind drawing one was the hardest as it was very hard to get a good idea of the silhouette of the object based on Kat's descriptions.

We then did a after effects and illustrator workshop. Whilst After effects was fun, it was hard to get a sense of what the program was actually capable of as we were only learning the basics. For illustrator however, it seamed very promising as the vector based drawing seemed like it could make up for my lack of digital painting skills as the vector shapes can make clean line work which is something I always struggled with in digital drawing.

Finally we did a stop motion workshop. For this we were show examples of stop motion animation and given a task of creating a bouncy ball animation during the week. I overall didn't enjoy the stop motion process as whilst the results are impressive, it is still a cursed form of animation to actually do in practice. As a result, for my first idea I tried to come up with something that would inspire me to make it more bearable to filming process. However I ended up with an idea that I really liked that was too ambitious to produce considering my skill level and available time. As a result, I went for a much simpler approach which involved a tiny clay ball bouncing across some keyboard keys. This made the animation process very finicky due to the scale, however I was able to produce a result that I was happy with. My next step for it is to edit it in premier so that I can add sound effects and make the footage look a little better.