Personal Reflection

This year was the first time I had directed a film, I wanted this opportunity and believed I could create a successful film.

Challenges

I felt that the most challenging aspect of this year was to try and keep everyone focused on the film and to make sure targets were being reached. Technical problems with rigs and animation were not anything to worry about, the challenge was in creating solutions to problems. I felt the best way of doing this was to just make sure our entire group literally stuck together every week, prior to this we were all working separately including my self and only were in all togethor about once a week. 

I decided my self that this was the problem, and that from this point I decided to make sure we were all altogether, this way if there was a problem with animation or someone was unsure of what I wanted, I could simply just speak to them and resolve the issue. I could also witness the difference in team spirit, people feed of positivity and when a whole team is all working, work flow tends to be stronger.

Me and Tara would always make weekly task to stay on track, she would actually write them while I would discuss to her what the tasks should be. We did not always make the task, but by having weekly updates we could carry the outstanding tasks to next week, which would create more workload but keep us on track and stop us falling behind.

Time management

At the beginning of the film I could manage my self more efficiently, Tara would draft up deadlines and I could stick to them . however as the film developed, I would often go into college with the intention of animating a scene, but would spend my entire day answering questions from Dean Tara and Sam Rob, and James, this was part of my job role and I felt it was more important to offer everyone direction. It did mean that I would then have to get home in the evening and work till early hours to make sure my tasks were complete.

I feel that being a director you have less time to pursue you own tasks, especially when the majority of your team our doing the animation rather then your self. It was not a negative experience, simply a challenging one and I did enjoy the job role, it just meant I had to be more dedicated this year with time management.

My time would also be spent checking emails every half an hour, day to day and phoning people and arranging when to next meet. I would sometimes visit my piers on a one to one basis, if there was a specific problem. generally we always met up as a group, it was only necessary to do this if it was a specif task, such as working the cameras out for the film. or trying to get the style of the film right. I woudl spend many days at sams so he could create the cameras in teh right place, this had to be done like this and he needed to use his desktop rather then his mac, due to its capability. The results were successful.