PROJECT FINISHED

Overall I have thoroughly enjoyed this project. I think that me and Matt worked very well together. We came up against a fair amount of problems and we managed to over come all of them, this is one of my proudest achievements. Another thing that I am very proud of is the improvement of my modelling, UV mapping and texturing. I have learnt a lot about these areas and gained a much greater understanding. I am extremely happy about the amount of models I managed to create, I have never created that many models at once. Another subject area that I learnt a lot about this term is rendering. I learnt a lot about the importance of setting up your rendering settings correctly. I also learnt about what some of the different rendering settings mean in Maya, AfterEffects and Premier. I gained a greater understanding of AfterEffects and learnt lots of new things such as the animated background in the solo shot. I had never used Premier before this project and I got to use it a fair amount so I have gained a fair amount of knowledge there. Premier is a piece of software which comes in very handy and I have no doubt that I will be using it a lot more in the future.

One of the main problems that we had was that we had to cut two shots because we did not have enough time. One shot was a close up of a facial expression and the other was the character strumming the guitar once. These two shots would have improved the film and I think that it would be extremely worthwhile putting them in before handing over to the client. Then we obviously had all the rendering problems and the problem in Premier. If I were to do the project again I think that I would try my hardest to complete the project a little earlier. I think that we completed the project in good time but I think that it would have been nicer if we had completed the piece a little earlier because then we could have included the two shots that we missed and the problems that we encountered would not have put as much pressure on us. But despite all of this the project ran fairly smoothly. I am extremely happy with the overall piece, I especially like the style. I think that the piece fulfills its role and that we have created a piece of work that the client will be happy with and that we can be proud of.

SHOWREEL

This unit also requires me to put together an individual interactive DVD showreel. I think that the showreel that I am going to put together will not be the showreel that I send out to employers as I need to improve the standard of work that I am going to include. I have gone through the work that I have created over the past two years at Ravenbourne and have decided what work I think are the best pieces and are worthy to go into my showreel, and what pieces of work I consider to be weaker and I will not be including in my showreel. I don't think that my work from my first year is that good especially compared to my second year work however there are some pieces that I will definitely include as it adds a variety to my showreel. Here is a list of the work that I am going to put into my showreel:

• Bouncing Ball 2D
• Bouncing Ball With Tail 2D
• Bouncing Ball 3D
• Bouncing Ball With Tail 3D
• Walk Cycle 2D 
• Perspective Walk Cycle
• Walk Cycle 3D
• Scissor Lift Model 
•  Industry Exercise 1 3D Character Model
•  Lampost Model
• Bin Model
• Amp Model
• Basic Guitar Model
• Rad Guitar Model
• My 2 Animated Scenes From 'Crunch Time'

I had a variety of 2D Bouncing Ball animations and Walk Cycles so I went through and picked the best two. Another piece of work that I did not include was my term 3 lip sync project I wanted to include this to show more of my animation ability but I thought it was not a strong as the other content in my showreel so I decided to Leave it out. I also left out some of the work I did on a first year project where we created an animatic. This work also showed up as very week compared to the rest so I did not include it.

As we were required to create an interactive DVD showreel it was important to include menus that would give the view of the showreel different options as to what they wanted to watch. So I thought I would split my showreel up in to these different menus:

• Play showreel - this will play the whole showreel
• 2D animation - this will play a video that just shows my 2D animation skills.
• 3D animation - this will play a video that just shows my 3D animation skills.
•  3D modelling and texturing - this will play a video that showcases my modelling and texturing skills. 
• Life Drawing - this will take you to a slideshow of images of my life drawing. 
• Final Pieces - this will take you to a sub menu that will include the final pieces that I am most proud of. You will then be able to click on one and you can watch the whole finished piece. I am going to use the 3 finished pieces of work from this year hear, these are my digital enviroment group project, my post production group project and my latest 'Crunch Time' promo group project.

I think that these menus show a variety of my work. Creating my overall showreel showed me that there are areas that I certainly need to work on. Looking back I think that there are pieces of work that I would now take out but I am happy with most of the work that I put in. Some of my models need to be re rendered as they do not look as crisp as they should. I did render in HD though perhaps I would have benefited more if I rendered using mental ray. I also had to edit the speed of the turn tables of my models I did this in AfterEffects. A big problem that I had was my interactive DVD showreel would not burn to my DVD disc. I spent a long time trying to figure this out. I went to Alex for some help and he knew the problem straight away. Some of my video's were mp4's, they all needed to be .mov's in order for it work. So I had to export all of my mp4 videos to .mov's. So I was cutting it fine but I managed to hand in in good time. Another problem that I have with my showreel is that the different content in my showreel such as the two animated scenes from 'Crunch Time' are not the same size as the other content in the showreel video.

Overall I am happy with the showreel that I now currently have. However I am definitely going to update and re work it in order to improve it. I am going to taking out some of my work as the specialism that I would like to go into is modelling. So I will now focus my showreel on my modelling skills. I also need to include a little title page before my showreel starts that states my name, e-mail address and my specialism. I thought that the whole process of creating a showreel was extremely beneficial as I now know how to structure my showreel, what to include, how important the choice of music is and what industry is looking for. I can now take this knowledge an improve what I have already created.