Final Exam- 4th Quater Reflection

             Bonjour mes amies! How are all of you? This is my final blog for my freshmen year so that's very exciting but also nerve-wracking. But it is all good. I am going to be talking about the project we did, so kind of like a reflection from yesterdays blog. But I am also going to be blogging about Q4 in general so let's jump right in.

Q4 Project                                                                                                      

        The project was to create a product of our own design and than make graphics and other thing to promote the product. We had to work in teams to get a feel for the real life work space and I think that was one of the most challenging parts, but my group was good for the most part. So first we had to brain storm for our product and come up with good ideas that we would be able to actually make work with our limited amount of knowledge. We threw around many ideas but stuck with the

Live Sticker idea where any sticker put on a hard surface can come to life and interact with the target audience which we decided would be children from 4-13 years of age but anyone can use the product.  We took the whole twoish months on our product and of rat most part all of class time was used, I think for the video section we didn't do anything because while i tired to help  my team get on task they talked about teachers and were on their phones but when we got to graphic design I think they realized that this project was going to take much more work an we all participated after that, for animation three out of the four of us were working he whole time. One of the most challenging things was trying to get one of my team members on task without sounding mean. She didn't do anything except the website and even than she didn't actually work on it until and week it was due. But I think my group was pretty professional and that was one of the only problems. Another I think was once we got further into the project and had to create more marketing tools like a logo and 3D animation my group got nervous and thought it was hard to create a whole bunch of stuff for a 2D object, but we pulled through and it all came out great. I learned a lot, how to create a whole product from scratch and how to make things appealing when your in a crunch. I learned how to keep people on task and how to animate even better a even put a jpg inside of a gif. I also learned how to animate on a mp4 file, very hard and took like 3 mornings before school to finish but it looked pretty good for my first time. Our products feedback was good, during our presentation we skipped a lot of stuff but I' just gonna blame it on nerves because my group was very nervous to do the presentation in front of second hour. 

Time Management 

    I used most of my time in Q4 pretty wisely, I tried to keep my group on task and working on somethings but somedays we didn't really do anything and I think its ok to have a relaxing day of sorts every once in a while because connately working on the project does get a little stressful. In times where I did finish early I went to help my group mates of they were there to help me, we all gave each other feed back and I really liked that about my group. I did always look at my work and try to clean up stray pieces of add missing info but mostly we used every second of class time. For my 2D animation I finished it like a week early but I went and cleaned up a lot of stuff, I think if I had more time the animation would've looked better but it still turned out ok. I did somethings outside of class, I created the product logo for Live Stickers outside of class so we had time in class to actually begin working and I tried to get blogs done outside of class so they didn't interfere with our work time.


Strengths 

    Some of my strengths for creating purposes in e-Comm was probably my ability to draw, it helped me a lot of be creative in graphic design and in animation. But some strengths that grew personality wise, I became more patient, projects sometimes took a couple of weeks and I had to keep working to make it look good the whole time, some teachers were a little slow at teaching to make sure we fully understood so I learned how to pay attention to them instead of becoming bored and daydreaming.  I also improved at taking charge but not being too bossy, or at least I hoped I did. I tried to be nice even if I was stressed and if people weren't listening. My creativity was worked on and I helped make up storylines for the commercial and for the animations. I was also very hardworking because I had to make sure this group didn't fail because of being of task and was kind of an everyday thing. I did think I grew as a person through this quarter long group project.



                                                     Improvement 

      I do think I could've been a bit nicer. I didn't cuss or yell at anyone but when there was thirty minutes left of class and no one was working I got on my team and I think that was a bit much for a group project. I am also very competitive so I wanted out to be the best and look nice but my group didn't care as much so I was always taking about how we need more of this and more of that, I could tell they got tired of it. I also think my time management could've been worked on because sometimes I would spend forever on a certain detail but forget about other stuff so prioritizing was a big problem. While we were trying to write a script for our performance we kept using our phones and after we had nothing to do we were...on our phones so distraction was also bit of an issue but we got through everything.








Overview 


       In all I enjoyed this semester very much, I got to try out animation which is what I really want to do and we got to do this project. I really liked ,y group, they were really fun to work with and it was a bast coming to e-Comm everyday, I love the environment and the people are different but its nice. I would love to have had animation longer but it's in the frame of 3rd quarter so sadly it cannot happen.  I wouldn't really change anything, maybe make the school itself closer to my house because I live thirty minutes away so that's kinda a pain, but I liked how everything went. I have learned so much this semester, teamwork, leadership, hardworking skills, it has probably impacted other aspects of my life because you really have to manage your time and prioritizing certain things, but that's all good stuff to have. This semester we got to feel what its like on reality TV since we did a shark tank thing, but I also have a very, tiny experience of working in real life like getting things done on time and making them look good. A goal I have for next year is to continue with the program and improve my animation skills.

I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of the week and finish through the final stretch of the school year.
Sophie the First.

Q4 Project

           Bonjour!! Comment ça va? Je suis fatiguée car des finales et je suis très nerveuse! 

          Hello, how are all of you? I am tired and very nervous for finals. The tests coming up are very big and tomorrow we are typing our final blog for this class. But this quitter we have been creating  a product of our own design and mine/my teams was Live Stickers and we created many things like a commercial and lots of graphics. With out further a-do let's jump right in.

Brain Storming 

    Our first task was to brain storm our product info like our product name and what our product was. After many hours of hard thinking I thought about some of my favorite movies more specifically Harry Potter. I thought about some of the more magical elements and than it came to me. Sticker that come to life when they are put on any hard surface. My group liked it so we did the idea and had to figure out colors and a slogan. For colors we wanted something with bugs, greens, and yellows so we made the Dino green and the title blue and white. We choose a Dino for the "face" of our product because I felt like it would appeal to more kids and we could do a lot of cute things with him. Next we worked on company name, we eventually choose Imagination Station after many, many days of thinking and looking at examples. For this we wanted it to be bold and creative since it's imaginative. 

Process (For Everything) 

-Video 

    We went into video first so we created a commercial, I wanted mine to be entertaining but cute for our target audience which is children 4-13 but I mean anyone can buy our product. So I wanted to do something with our little Dino friend. A group member named arson was out filmier and helped us get good shots while giving us creative ideas. We filmed many shots and even had some stop animation that Carson and I did. I made the frames while he took the pictures. After we got all the shots filmed I spent a week or so on our commercial to try and give it that special feeling that would leave children hooked. I choose the song Happy because it's a carefree song that gave fun feeling and go happy feels. We were all supposed to work on one and only Carson and I did so it was a battle to see who's would be on the website, and honestly I think Carson's should've because he's was more dramatic and funny while mine was cute. I think both our ours were good but I did a lot on the website so think that his should've been featured. 

           

Commercial For Live Stickers 

-Product Logo

     Next we did graphic design which is where all the logos and coupon designs come from, really we just did all the designing there for our product. First we worked on our product logo and I spent a day on it I wanted the Dino to be smiling so I did the wink to try and make him appear really happy, which I think worked our pretty good. I also kept the original color scheme with the blues and greens as much as I can. This took me a few days to finish because I wanted it to be very clean and cute looking, which I think the end result turned out to be pretty good. One of the first sketches was the Dino having a larger head and longer nose but after drawing that out I went for a more Disney approach.
                             

Product Logo 

-Company Logo 

      After the product logo was created we worked on the company ago and I think that was the hardest logo we had to come up with, we just couldn't find anything that worked and it was hard because another one of our group member named Ramal wasn't sure on how to work some of the tools, it was look because he figured them out, but it was a bit rough at first. We decided to do a brain because that is how you imagine things and w kept the blue in our logo. I drew the brain by hand and we were in a rush so it doesn't look our best but I think it turned out pretty good.  I also added the bold black line to make it look more dramatic. 

Company Logo 

-Product Ad

    After the company logo was created we worked on the ad for our product. I left Carson in charge of the ad but Ramal and myself gave him input and suggested certain ideas, I think I made up the Dino to be the circle of the 10% but that might have been another group member. I do think that if we had used the text tool instead of hand drawing everything if might have looked better, cleaner. But than again our target audience is children so maybe the less clean way was in our favor. we also tried to match all the blues in our product add with product logo and we did that for the most part. We also added our company logo in the bottom left corner to copy right it. 

Product Ad

-Product Description

   The next thing we did was a product description type thing which was supposed to grab the audience's attention and give a little summary over the product while having the slogan somewhere, little story; our slogan took us forever to come up with, it was originally really long but we shortened it after having another groups input. We also wanted this ad to be very eye catching so we added the blue, black, and white gradient. Ramal was in charge of this part but again we all pitched in ideas to create this final product. The little words on the bottom say "Pick any sticker, stick it on any surface, and watch it come to life" which is a clever play on our slogan Pick, Stick, Live!

                                           

Product Description 

-Web Banner 

    Lastly I created the web banner about two days before we were going to animation so it may seem a bit rushed but we can call it the sloppiness that worked in our favor. It does look childish and the font only makes it look for younger children anyways. I wanted to add something different so after looking at other web banners for big companies I decided I wanted to do these little circles that drew attention but not a lot, just a little something in the background. I also wanted to keep the original blue that we had for the product logo so there is some of that in there. The web banner was easy to make, I just used rectangles and colored in the edges to make them all look them same and the circle tool to create all the little circles in the background.  

                           

Web Banner

-2D Animation

    Our last station was animation and let me tell you I loved it. The animation took me the whole two week we were working there but it turned out pretty good. I probably could've added a few more frames while he is running to make it seem faster and less laggy. I also could've made him a little bigger so people could actually see what was going on, but the animation turned out all right. We started the first day off as a review and than my team brain stormed on what we wanted to do, I mostly followed my design but there were a few tweaks because let's face it, the first version is almost never perfect. I wanted him to first see the mysterious white circle than eventually end up inside to make the product logo and that happened but I used the wrong green so there's a little fade of colors but it kind pf looks cool. Overall it looked great and I am proud for making such a cute animation in two weeks. I'm kinda mad that in the commercial it speeds up certain parts and slowed down certain parts so it looks bad and not clean, but I'm a beginner so I will learn how to fix everything in time. 

2D Animation

-3D Animation 

    So I was not in charge of the 3D animation that was Carson and Ramal and let me tell you, they both did fantastic jobs. I don't really like 3D animation, which is kinda bad if I want to make it in the big world because that's the common thing now but I just can't figure it out. So Carson did the Live Stickers packet that is shown below to showcase how many stickers would be on a packet and what it would look like in a real environment. Ramal did a 3D animation of our company logo and I know she had a hard time working on it, but I'm pretty sure it turned out pretty rockin' awesome. it took both of them two weeks to finish their animations as well and that's just because animation is such a patient hobby. They both did their part very well and although Carson forgot to add our 2D company logo, it still got the point across. 

   

   3D Animation Sticker Packet

What Did I learn and What Would I Change

    I learned a lot while doing this project like how to work with a group and how to get everything done within a certain time limit but getting everything done great. I learned how to get my not-so attentive group focused for class periods so that we could actually get work done. Maybe I would change some of the end products, like all my things for example, I would add tiny details and make it look neater than it already is. But I liked my group so I wouldn't change that and I liked our product and everything that was made for the most part. I would keep everything the same with the group stuff because we all got along and I really enjoyed coming to class and getting to work on the project.I would change some things with our presentation because we did not cover everything we were supposed to. For example, we did not say the target audience, we didn't show the animations, we didn't even talk about the bios page. It was kinda a mess, we also almost lost all of our work, Thank goodness we didn't. I'm just going to blame everything on nerves and we can try better next time. 

Overall I loved this and all though I felt stressed 24/7 I enjoyed making the project and working with a team that was very nice and cooperative. We could've done somethings better but where the fun in boundaries and rules. Everything is more of a guide line anyways. 

Hope every one's final tests go great and you pass with flying colors,

Sophie the First. 

Product Animation

      BONJOUR!!!! Welcome back to my blog, today's is al about or product animation. I enjoyed making this so much so with out further a-do lets get right into the blog.


     First we had to brainstorm with our team so my group of four split into two pairs, one for the 3D animation development and my group was the 2D animation development. I suggested our "face" or dino to be messing around than suggested our dino to find  circle to get trapped in and eventually becomes the logo you know today.


     Next we got to work. The whole thing took me about 2 weeks or how ever long our animation rotation was. I was working on it the entire time to make sure everything was perfect and that the detail was good, no sloppiness. I tired to remember the rules like squash and stretch as well as the go in and go out. I accidentally made the dino's skin color a bit to green so at the end you can see the color shift and at the beginning it's a little sloppy and moves so fast you ca't really see him sniffing the air, so the small details of my animation was lost due to the speed. But it turned out ok so I'm not to worried about it.

    Overall I loved making this animation. Well I enjoy animation in general but this one was one of my favorites. It was fun to make something of my own creation and do whatever I wanted to do with the animation. I further developed my animation skills and it was a challenge to convey what I wanted to with a 2D character but I think I succeeded. It was also a little hard to create a story that was interesting but not to advanced for me, because I'm just starting to learn the ropes.

 All next time,

Sophie the First!