e-Communication Reflection

During my sophomore year in Animation, I learned a lot of new skills that I can continue to use later in high school and after I graduate and move on.  I became more familiar with programs like Maya and After Effects, and made new friends that I completed projects with. I learned to work hard and meet deadlines for the most part, and when I was gone I forced myself to get caught up. My technical improvements included extruding shapes in Maya, adding a glow effect, or animating a 3D object, none of which I knew how to do before the class.

In order to learn and practice these skills, I listened at the beginning of class, referred to Google Classroom documents, and asked friends or looked for tutorials online. For my final project, I worked with some awesome, hard-working guys.  We all contributed to the project, and the final project turned out even better than we thought because of all the time and effort we put forth. My group members pushed me to do my part and learn how to create a realistic hologram.

The ability to cooperate and create high-quality products is vital to being an animator, because those things are used on a daily basis in the workplace. The things I’ve learned in my animation class are things that I will take out into the animation industry, so it makes sense to perfect them now instead of in the future.

 As a fairly inexperienced animator, I still make simple mistakes in my projects, like an object going through the floor, or adding an object into a scene without working on color correction. I still turn things in on time and correctly add textures, mattes, and special effects.

I would change the communication between teacher and student, because sometimes the students are not aware of certain assignments or do not have adequate instructions on the location of files or due dates. This could be corrected very easily but many times is not. Then, students will have NHIs or assignments that “need improvement” and the teacher will not always bring it to their attention.

Animation has been very beneficial and has taught me many things that I may use later if I decide to pursue a career as an animator. There are just a few things about the process and communication within e-Communication that are tedious and badly set up.