Semester End Evaluation

Given the amount of conflicts regarding my concept, I feel I've got a clear idea as to how my production will come about. The story has been revised twice, and much of the original concept is gone, however I still feel that I've retained the important elements I tried to get across - A robot suffering from amnesia trying to find his place amongst other life forms. The underlying theme of acceptance remains intact after whittling away a character and a pivotal scene of the robot sitting in front of the Northern Lights which was, what I felt at the time, the centrepiece of the animation. Thankfully, I feel I can live without it.

In terms of character design, I remained faithful to the original concept. The robot, B.C., is more or less how I envisioned him to be. The penguin is merely the simple animal character, he could've been anything be it a tiger or bear, I just decided on the penguin after choosing the secluded Antarctic location. The location itself was ideal, as I wanted it to be a place void of people. After reworking a few other story elements, particularly the ending, it was time to start modelling my characters in 3-D. A task I was not looking forward to. I'm far more comfortable with drawing or modelling a character out of clay, which up until that point was all we had been doing. Once the clay model was scanned in 3-D, things started to fall apart. My lack of perspective and general modelling skills within Maya left me more or less screwed with the penguin. While Jack modelled my penguin, I added joints to rig him up. After some minor tweaking, he animates reasonably well. During the end of the semester, I also made some headway modelling my robot. Only time will tell if the rig will work out, though given his Maya friendly design, he should prove simple enough.

Considering I spent most of the semester overcome with a reoccurring flu, I feel the preproduction for my animation came along well enough. I have a clear vision of how the finished animation will look. There have been numerous instances where I've considered defecting back to 2-D, the most notable being when I completed some concept art, which inspired me to try the 2-D approach. However tempting that may be, I do want to attempt Maya as best as I can. My preproduction has revealed numerous options in how to complete this animation. Looking back on the semester, the various skills I've learned with Maya have given me some small measure of confidence, whereas before I had no idea how I could ever create this animation in 3-D within a 28 week period. Hopefully as the year progresses, I'll acquire enough skill to finish this production to a reasonable quality.