Evaluation

What a long project this has been! I must admit when I got given the brief after Christmas I was fairly disappointed, however when I started to think about it, I thought I could do something really great with this... that thought didn’t last for long as I really started to struggle with inspiration.

I watched film after film and looked through magazines, books, internet and couldn’t find anything that inspired me. I eventually chose Edward Scissorhands because it is... was, one of my favourite films and I love the innocence of Edward but how he is portrayed as evil. My original idea was to create it in a doll world similar to toy story as you can see on my blog. I wanted to create a house made out of doll parts and have the inventor and Edward as dolls and everything looking like plastic. A bit like a Ken and Barbie animation but with a creepy side to it as I’m easily creeped out by dolls. I wanted it to have a Frankenstein twist to it!

So I started planning however after a conversation with a tutor we decided I didn’t have enough time to make the whole house and that for a few seconds animation it wouldn’t be worth it and to concentrate on the inside of the house. After going home and trying to redesign my ideas I sort of got fed up with it and it didn’t seem the same so AGAIN decided to change my idea except this time I didn’t have one so I started to create my environment hoping I would get inspiration as I was going along. I created basic things like stairs, tables, furniture to go in my environment that I knew I needed.

It’s a really inappropriate way to start a project but time was ticking and I was running out of ideas, so. I started with an attic room, thought it didn’t look good so made a basement and added all my furniture then when it came to animating I thought it was too much like the original film so went back to the attic idea! Silly I know. Anyways I love modelling so I didn’t mind; it was when I came to adding lighting and cameras I got stuck.

I found modelling and rigging my characters fairly easy I didn’t really have a problem, only with the envelopes however that was only minor. I also found animating my machine fairly easy however when I merged it into my scene it didn’t animate properly and I can’t figure out why. But the original file works fine! Most of my problems came when I had to add the cameras and render! Cameras and rendering have always been a problem for me and I think always will be. When I was doing my modelling I was trying hard to keep face counts down the whole way through however when I rendered after a certain point it would say not enough memory to allocate mesh or something along those lines but it would render it fine as a still and as a sequence up to 166 stills then it would always come up with that message. I ended up having to delete my fire effect for my machine which was one of my focal points. I did not use after effects in the end for a couple of reasons; I didn’t have the time, and I don’t really understand it properly... still! It’s something I am keen to learn over summer when I have no deadlines or projects to concentrate on.

That aside I am happy with my modelling anyways. I think my modelling has really improved since last year, in fact even from the beginning of this year! It took me a long while to get the hang of simple modelling I used to make a mess out of it but it has really improved and I am really happy with it! I am also really happy with my portfolio project. I spent a lot of time on that because I was just model making there was not a lot of animation and rigging ect. I spent too much time on it really. I really need to allow myself more time next year in my work; it’s the main thing that lets me down every time. And I’m really disappointed in myself for allowing it to happen again in this project.