So, before I started my holiday, I set myself a plan to stick to so that I would be ahead with my work, when it came to coming back to college two weeks later.
I thought that I did rather well here and even though I did not hit all of my official goals, I still believe that I set myself up well for when I got back and that was the main goal of the timetable.
The Video
The first objective that I decided to have a crack at, was making the construction video for my website. Like I said before hand, I wanted to get all of the content done for the website before I started it. This would mean that I would know what to talk about and it would give me a good idea on how I want those product pages to look while fitting alongside the video and animation. So, as I said in my reflective blog posts, I ran into a lot of problems throughout this project. However, because I gave myself lots of time it meant that it didn't throw me back and put me in a bad position. One of the problems that I ran into was struggling with building the shelf. Me and the person I worked with on the first day did not think that it would be that hard to build. We ended up making a lot of mistakes, having to go back on ourselves and consequently deleting footage that was unusable. This was quite annoying and it really stressed us out at points. We also ran into these same problems when I worked with my mum on the second day. However, it does also show me that we all struggled with constructing furniture and that we would all benefit from the site.
Another problem that pushed me back was that my friend decided that he did not want to help me after the first day. At first I had no idea what to do, my other friends were on holiday and would not be back until college started again. I did not want to wait this long, I wanted to finish what I had started and having a gap in-between that far apart, would mean that I would have to keep the pieces back and deconstruct the set that I had set up for the video. I did not want this to happen. Thankfully, my mum decided that she would come help me, I was very grateful for this and even though she was not the best with a camera, she did a great job. I did not believe that shooting the video would take more than a day but as you know, it did and luckily I had forward thought and set myself some extra time on my timetable, just in case something like this happened.
Editing the video was the next challenge. Fortunately, I edit my own videos in my own time for fun and I already had a good idea on how to use the software. I have to say, if I did not do this, I would have had no idea what to do when it came to editing my construction video. This part was quite easy, all I had to do was make sure that I got the right footage in the right order. After looking at the footage, I realised that the lighting was not as good as it looked on the camera and this was rather saddening because it meant that the video looked quite grainy. Also, the parts where my mum was filming were quite shaky - I tried to stabilise the video to the best of my ability, however it still looks rather shaky at times. I managed to get this done in a day which was the exact time I gave myself in my timetable.
The Animation
This was the next project that I had to do, I was at college for this because I did not have the software at home.Making the animation was not good, I really struggled with the software and I could not get to grips with it. I decided to pick an Item from Ikea that was very, very popular but did not include a lot of steps to make, I knew that I would struggle with the animation and I wanted to make it as easy as possible for me so I could get it done in the time provided and still learn a lot of skills. For the first day I did not make a lot of progress, I really got lost with moving everything and it ended up looking clunky and not good at all. I was really not proud of the animation, however I gave myself another day to try and improve what I had done.
For the second day, I decided to go back over what I had done and change a lot of things. I did this because I believed that it did not look good enough. It did not look clear enough for users to understand what was going on and it looked very clunky. I decided that I would only include the first part of the build for the animation because I was really not making a whole lot of progress and it was really stressing me out. I have shown a few people the animation and they thought that it looked good, it was clear and it was paced well. I am happy that at least it achieved it's purpose.
I had another crack at the animation when I got back to college. I did this because I knew peers that had a good understanding of the software and they really helped me clear it all up and make it look a bit more understandable. Even though this process was a failure in my opinion, I still learned quite a lot and gained a simple understanding of animate.
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