Evaluation

Responsive was interesting. It was new in terms of having many more deadlines, being able to choose your own briefs and finding/working with collaborative partners which was probably useful for experience, even if a lot of it left me feeling quite stressed.

I found a competitions that sounded great but they had already ended or were ending very soon giving me the choice of rushing work for submission or not submitting at all. My priority in this module was to make work that was suitable for my portfolio, since the last year and a half has focused more on technical animation skills than areas I am interested in - character design/visual development. With both Outcast Odyssey and Animation Portfolio Workshop, I was unable to submit to these competitions but both provided me with new portfolio material. It was still a useful experience to design characters with an actual theme and specific requirements unlike most previous modules we have had, and those limits helped me figure out what works and what doesn’t, how to design according to audience and function (even if I aimed my Odyssey design more towards animation).

I found that it was easy to be overambitious with projects such as WeTransfer, which could have been possible to do without other larger modules to do alongside it and deadlines around the same time. Overambitious or not, I still found that the YCN and D&AD briefs limited me too much - most had briefs that weren’t close to the sort of practice I wanted to do, and even focusing on character designs in YCN didn’t work out well because I had less to pitch; my main focus was not to create adverts or campaigns, meaning that my pitch boards may not have been as relevant to the brief as those who focus more generally in projects, or who enjoy creating a whole production.

I learned a lot through peer assessment including looking at other peoples’ work, mostly in terms of what the brief was not asking for - it is easy to try to mold a brief to what you want to do yourself which works fine if you aren’t entering a competition or have a very vague brief, but when your first concern is creating what you want to create rather than what the brief specifically wants, it gets tricky. That definitely applies to my The Idle Man project since I had no real intention of going beyond the character design stage, but the range of briefs we had didn’t inspire me in the slightest.

Finding briefs myself was more fun, even if I had the aforementioned problems with time although character design competitions are not quite as popular as other general illustration, and visdev ones are almost non-existent. I looked at a few animation competitions but a lot of them were non-specific, or they were mostly bothered about the length and technical side of the animation which didn’t give me enough to work with brief-wise. If I repeated this module I would just have to branch out and accept that I might have to do more briefs that are less relevant to me, but competitions aren’t that appealing to me unless they are character design and the whole ‘doing it for the exposure’ idea isn’t my cup of tea. I would rather work alongside people on projects where I can provide solely the design side of the project and nothing else. For our collaborative brief, I chose a partner who had similar interests to me and I knew would be happy creating the same kinds of things as me. Unfortunately we didn’t make as large a project as we could have been, in part because we had other things going on in our lives that didn’t make work easy, but because of that we were able to compromise and understand each other better than others partners may have been able to. I much prefer doing a collaborative brief and would like to do so in the future, which would also give me a much wider range of briefs and competitions to work with.

Overall, I learned to work quicker than before just to try to get work finished for competitions, and to manage multiple smaller projects around multiple big ones. I learned how to push through the stress to get more work done and accept the fact that not all work I do can be relevant to my practice. Having smaller projects made blogging and the organising side of things easier, but swapping between numerous projects didn’t have me as enthusiastic about the work I was doing as usual. I learned that the idea side was definitely more fun than creating finished products (especially where adverts are concerned) although I wish I had more time to spend on the development of each project, but now I know how quickly I can whip up ideas and designs if I need to.