Semester troubles

For the last blog, I've been requested to post a summary of main issues I've encountered over the semester.

First, I think it's extremely important that everyone gets a place-holder voice as soon as the project is started. You don't need to do anything fancy, just record yourself in the way your actor will present the text and you'll avoid A TON of revisions a few weeks into the project.

When it comes to drawings, pen is much, much more forgiving than pencil. I wasted an entire week of work and drawing because of the grainy aspects of pencil. Made me want to rip my hair out!

Your storyboard shouldn't be 5x as long as the rest of the class, as the animation is much easier said than done.

File management is extremely important, and I regret not taking account for this earlier because you end up with exponentially more files than any other process of design I've worked with.

Transitions are the stitching of animation, without them your work will fall apart at the seam and be very unappealing. This is mostly important because many students felt it was alright to leave transitions until they actually animated and found themselves SOL.

Accept evolution, the finished result is usually unlike anything you started with.

Staring at a computer screen for so long gave me pretty bad headaches (especially when masking frame by frame)...not sure what you can do about that, but it makes it hard to work on other homework.

Unlike most, I never had too many issues rendering.