Tuesday, 20 January 2015

OUIL504 Illustration 1 - End of Module Evaluation

Overall, I feel my progress in module has been positive. I’ve found it incredibly challenging, and often very overwhelming but at this end point I feel my outcomes are competent and meet the criteria that was required by the respective briefs.

I’ve used a lot of processes in this module that are not typically my default – especially in regards to traditional printing. Whilst I have brief background experience in animation, I’ve never animated anything to a polished quality beyond 5 seconds before, so that was also a particular milestone in my practice.

Whilst I was happy with the final outcome of my printed pictures brief, I feel like there is potential for more to be done with it that hasn’t quite been met. I had never used screen-printing as a process before this – and a mixture of printing errors; both out of my control and self inflicted ones due to lack of organisation, thinking ahead and poor time management in some parts have been the main reason for this. Had I planned more effectively, I think a lot of these errors would have been preventable, and I might have been able to come out with something even better than what I have at this point in time.

Much the same with my animation – whilst I feel the outcome is definitely good, its perhaps not as good as it potentially could have been.  I think my relative comfort with animating in photoshop as a process made me somewhat complacent – and instead of pushing it to its lengths I created something that – whilst looks nice and fits the criteria of the brief was perhaps somewhat ‘easy’, and not as professionally finished as I would have liked it to be. I put the animations off a lot because I knew they would be a relatively simple task for me to do, and I think they suffered because I didn’t leave the time to really comb over them and make them extra final.

As ever with nearly all my uni work – my biggest struggle has been against organisation and focus. I’ve spent a large majority of this module feeling incredibly behind (even though, in hindsight, perhaps not as behind as I thought that I was) – the rolling amount of work was really difficult for me to manage, and I found myself trying to thinly spread myself across several different planes of it as opposed to prioritising what needed to be done in order to get the most out of all of it.

This lead to me feeling stressed a lot, and I feel like this project has suffered because I haven’t enjoyed it or put as much of myself into it because of this constant sensation of falling behind all the time. The final crit was good, because it was a good reminder of exactly why I enjoyed being on the course and completing the curriculum set – when a lot of this module I’ve felt more like I’ve been jumping through hoops to catch up with others around me instead of directing my focus into my work – where it should have been.

Analysis of my work and others has put my practice in a broader sense into context a lot more. Although I feel like I’ve struggled with this module, I feel much more prepared now to take on things down the line. By being forced to consider this quantity of work, I now feel more confident of being able to repeat another long project like this without falling behind as much – because ive identified a lot of potential pot-holes that I hit along the way with this one.

For future projects, I want to try to continue to have fun and be as innovative with the briefs as I can. I didn’t explore the visual journal as much as I could have, which I think might have rescued me from getting too slumped in the reoccurring mishaps from my screen-prints, and would have given me a greater breadth of visual development that I could work with.

I also think keeping a journal to record more immediate occurrences that I can organise later would be really beneficial. Whilst I’m definitely Improving and starting to work more as a Level 5 student, I think I really do need to nip my unorganisation in the bud now – because I feel its what is holding me back from pushing my work to the next level and starting to work more as a professional.

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