ANC220 - Week 13 - Reflection

Time to reflect.

This last week was a mad scramble to finish off the CIU project as well as Nigel's animations and then preparing my show reel. That last part took quite a lot longer than I thought - Monday saw a lot of pregress but Tuesday was basically written off between class and the expo. I was out of the house for 12 hours that day and Wednesday suffered because of it. To be fair, staying in on Wednesday and missing the Internship lecture worked out well for me because it was offered again on Thursday. Which is today. Although I did also miss out on Phil's class. I've just finished submitting both my showreel for Phil, with a collection of all my work in Tri 4 (well not ALL of it, tehre's were projects like my ocarina which I didn't finish so didn't include, and there's all the graphic work I did for CIU which wasn't included either), as well as my Showreel for Nigel, including all the animations he wanted. I feel about ready to eave the country now, btu I still have this blog and the required reflection for CIU to go. But I can taste the beers already.

It's been really tough this Tri. Like really tough - I don't recall this kind of academic induced stress since exam time my last trip around Monash and that's due to me totally sucking at exams. The stress would get to me and I'd forget things in the exam hall and it wouldn't be a good time. So even without that added stress, I've still felt just as sick at times during this more practical work based course. If anything, I'm a better student this time around, now that I'm older, so my time management has improved dramatically, my desire to learn is much grander, so I have to assume it's simply about the self imposed nature of my workflow. OK that sounded so stupid, but hang on - what I'm trying to say, and bear with me, because mentally my synapses aren't firing at 100% these days. What i'm trying to say is that there's been a substantial amount of work required for the assessments this term. There always has been a sufficient amount of work required in the last 3 term, enough to keep students progressing with each week's learning outcomes and it was always manageable, as long as you kept up to date. This term though, I was studying every day. I would only have time off on the days I was working, and after the first few weeks of term, I had to drop a shift because I need more time for school - and in saying that, I still found myself just in front of the 8 ball - I've not for one moment this term felt comfortable with taking a day or two off from study. I've mentioned it before that I don't study as efficiently as some others - my mum would tell me stories about how she was a gun at school and loved to study and did it well, but that wasn't me. I learn slower, and by repetition. I have to mess up a few times before I learn the right way and often to my detriment but always, ultimately for my own benefit. But it is what it is, right? It's the last day of term, and I'm submitting my second to last piece of work and then it'll be all over. Those beers.

So what did I learn from this whole Studio experience? Well we were exposed to it last year but of course this time around we had a much larger team. Not only that, but we had a much more structured approach to the project life cycle. I assume that some reason for us to write these blogs is to assist you, Phil and the other educators in knowing if this kind of change (because this is the first time studio 2 and 3 joined, yes?) worked and if so how? Well having multiple leads helps a lot - Tom and Rob together, with Phil to back the up, made DOING much easier - this is because we were all given tasks. Even though Trello lost traction towards the end, between it, slack and general class time, there was a lot of back and forth between the directors and the workers. I personally like that approach, whether I'm leading or following, I believe structured direction is the best way to get the most amount of work done and done correctly. I am happy that there were multiple passes for each stage of the project, even if it meant that Simon and I found ourselves spending dozens of hours over the course of multiple nights in this studio, reworking the same scene over and again. Because in the end, the film was better for it and so were we. If that hadn't happened, we may not have pushed that extra hour or extra day and settled for a product that ultimately wasn't as good as it could have been. Howe ever, to play both sides, simply assigning tasks to the workers is only as good as the detail about the tasks they're given. Rob for example had a clear idea in his head how the shots should look - but the materials provided to the workers, by way of storyboards, lacked vital information. Nothing was annotated, no time frames and key models hadn't been supplied at that point, even though they should've been ticked off in the previous phase. Now I also understand that the leader's eyes can't be everywhere at once, and they themselves delegated tasks to smaller leaders and at that point they have a due diligence, and of course it goes so on and so forth. What I'm trying to say is the method worked for me at least. I believe if Studio progresses this way again next tri or next year, that the same staples should be present - leaders, who can delegate to other leaders, all of whom are decision makers but those directions themselves need to be checked and understood by the works before anyone can start working. Simply saying "go" doesn't work - because there's a lot of minds at work and some function more maturely than others and some fall ill or go missing. The lines of communication need ot be open at all times, and I think we all did a good job of that this tri, but key pieces were still falling through the cracks. Missing models at the animation phase is not on. Same goes for missing textures during comping etc. there should be a definitive sign off process to best prevent this from happening and if it does, which of course it can because anything can and will go wrong, then the communication should be there so everyone understands what's going on. Many times I heard conversations from the guys here about decisions that were made or things were missing or broken and everyone was busy speculating why and they did that because no one knew!

If Phil is going to run this unit again in the same manner, I'm sure he has key take always, just as we in studio 2 have. Speaking of which, I think being Director would be pretty cool - I've always wanted to have my own games company and make video games that I design, this could be the closet I get to achieving that for some time! well we'll see - there are some talented guys in this class, but before my cohort, I'll touch on the studio 3 guys. They were all great, rob and tom as leaders were brilliant and tenn and ross are both very skilled, it's just s shame that those 4 are all there is - i would've loved to have seen the skill sets of more people. As for my guys, again, there are some brilliant minds here - there are also some who will be detrimental to the success of our project in the following tri - and that's one of the reasons I think I could direct, because whoever is in charge will need to handle those situations with the proper conduct. I honestly feel that penalties should be in place for work that doesn't get completed on time or to specification. There shouldn't be times where I was sitting here late one night and another student was by themselves, when they were meant to be in a team of two, working on a piece of work that two people were meant to complete. This shouldn't happen as it puts unnecessary tress on that person. That's just one example, but there are others - people were asked to re do work (myself included) and that work should be presented asap! It was already due yesterday and so I for instance, got to work on work that I had to redo as fast as I could because I knew it would hold up the pipeline and that I had dates to adhere to. Conversely, there should be a reward system - I hope the people who pushed the extra mile in this studio are rewarded with the appropriate marks so that they go into the next tri invigorated by a job well done.

There are already ideas flowing for studio 3 - I've been talking with the guys and we;re eager to get to work on our own terms! although some of us require a break, we're eager to get back to it in a few weeks!

OK is there anything else I learned? I learned that I need to rob a bank to support myself financially, because if the work load is even greater next term then I can't imagine how little I'll be able to go to my paying job. I can't imagine it will be much :( OK how to spin that into something constructive? hm, let's call it time management. I mentioned above that i'm much better with my time management today than i was yesterday - so i guess I'll have to be even better tomorrow. Life should be spent bettering yourself right? I'll have to work smarter rather than harder - I spent hundreds of hours (actual hours - not just fluff for the timesheet!) working on tasks that if I did them again now, i could do them quicker - but that's because of experience, so next tri I hope to be better at things and therefore make less missteps which cost me time. Again, having more detailed direction might assist with this so whether I'm the one giving it, or receiving it, as long as the information is readily available it should save some time as less re do's may not be necessary.

Anything I regret? I regret not having more time for my independent work. That really saddened me - I feel like every week I've bitched about not getting to work on my own project and looking back at this ter I only got a little amount done - that's not to say that I didn't put a lot of time and effort into what I did - I'm proud that I reworked my entire website, and created the few models for myself that I did, but it wasn't enough to satisfy me - I dedicated much much more time to studio and Nigel's class than my own interests in the skills that I want to develop. And that leads me into...

Anything I wish do differently? Yes, focus on the skills that I'm lacking in and that I suck at - Phil gave me a great list of things to look into and to work on in order to produce work that I really want to see and work that'll help propel me in the right direction when looking for a job - I hope to spend a considerable amount of time doing that next term, so that by Tri 6 I'm ready to sharpen those new skill seven further - remember, better yourself every day! Omg, how lame.

Seriously now, my fingers hurt and I still need to do this again for Ian with regards to CIU. I hope I hit the points needed to satisfy the reflective process. You have my show reel, so you can see what work was done this week as well as all term. But just so that this isn't a sad, image less document, I'll pop something below...or at the top. I haven't decided yet.

- Ryan.