Well, the last week and a half has been so intense that now I feel exhausted, a little dissatisfied with myself and full of confusion about technology.
Various stages of the journey: I did all the action sequences on peg paper to test which worked well up to a point, but when I took the vector drawings into Flash and set up the scenes as the drawings they didn't seem to work as well. I think you can get too close to a project and lose sight along the way. I am not sure now if my project is the way I intended or not, think it is too soon to tell. But I definately wasn't able to concerntrate on the look of the finished work because of trying to fathom my way through the jungle of technology, which I feel really hindered by. Even when you know what your're doing things can go wrong with computers, like software crashing etc, so adding that to not being knowledgable enough can be a huge headache.
I really felt the lack of technolgy knowledge throughout this project, there is so much that can be achieved but it is knowing what the software packages can do and how to do it.
I couldn't remember how to use certain parts of Flash and I feel that I didn't use it to the best effect when I did get into it. Perhaps I am more of a pre-production person, as I really enjoyed the early stages of the project. Writing the idea down, creating the first character drawings and sets, designing the look and doing the story board. I don't know whether over the course of the next few years if that will change as I become more experienced on the software programmes or not, it feels like there are people who are naturally gifted at operating programmes and those who get some one else to do it for them! Overall I found it difficult to estimate how long each stage was going to take because I didn't know enough about the following stage. I don't feel very happy with the final result, at the moment!
The last day was very difficult, as the DVD burner decided not to work, the exporting settings of Quicktime movies from Premiere squashed my final work, and I exported it at various settings in the end trying to sort this problem. I had to change the settings from the notes on Moodle, so it took most of the afternoon to export the file. The second DVD burner set up wouldn't accept my + disc and I had to get a - disc instead. When I finally had my DVD some of the line tests do not play from the disc and apparently these will have to be dragged onto the desktop to play properly.
Lastly on a good note, the things that I will take from this as a positive are that I liked my idea, (even if someone else would have produced a better finished piece) I am happy with the planning stages and my thought process. I managed to learn alot about Illustrator in doing all the vector drawings, as at the start I had never used this programme before. I think it helps in getting to grips with a new programme if you already know a similar programme, in this case Corel Draw. I do feel alot more comfortable in opening Illustrator now and with using layers, which is something I had not worked with. So this is the main achievement, which is good, but that took alot more time than it would have done, and therefore caused me to get behind schedule.
I did enjoy most of the project and I do think it is a really good idea for a project, but it was quite stressful in the second half.
