Lifting Tower Brief

Initially I was skeptical about undertaking this brief. It sounded like a lot of fun but I was very aware of how much other work I needed to do at the time so was hesitant to take on another project. Mike encouraged me to stay and commit to the brief because he felt like it would be very beneficial to my practice.

Lifting Tower Concept Art

Lifting Tower Moodboard

Lifting Tower Initial Storyboard

The journey on this brief was not always easy and it definitely put my abilities to the test. But in the long run I felt I was very successful. We began the brief by working in groups of around six and in each group we had to come up with a pitch each to show to each other. then with these pitches we were to figure out how we could fit each of them into an around a minute in length animation. What came next did confuse me and I feel effected the workflow. We were then put into new groups as certain people decided to opt out of committing to the rest of the brief. I felt like this was a bit jarring as I was not prepared for this change. This change was made more jarring still because I and the others in the group essentially had to abandon our initial ideas that we had put time into developing, I for example had spent quite a bit of time and attention fleshing out the idea into a fully coloured storyboard. But to be able to work efficiently as a team we simply could not just stick to our fleshed out ideas because they were all too complicated and different.

Malachi, Callum and I were put into a group with Janice a third year illustrator. I was initially quite skeptical about being paired with an illustrator because going into the brief we were told that everyone was expected to animate. Luckily Janice had previously done some animation and i feel the quality of her animation was very high.

This experience of developing our animations was an incredibly rewarding experience to me because seemingly by accident I found myself undertaking a director role of the project. I found that everyone in the group was essentially happy for me to direct meetings and arrange meet ups. I felt like this would be a lot more stressful than it turned out to be and I think the reason for this is all the members of my group were incredibly easy going, easy to work with and eager to produce the best animations possible.

We did run into obstacles down the production line. My first bit of animation for the project was very poorly received and I essentially needed to start all over again. The reason for this is because I tried to do an animation with no line-work. I felt like this would test my abilities and was a chance for experimentation. As a first attempt it was okay, but it was not up to a professional standard and I felt like I had let my team down. But I produced another animation very quickly after and i feel like the second animation I produced was far higher in quality.