I won't lie, if I really wanted to I could make this reflective statement just be a list of every little detail that went wrong from premise all the way to the end, but that wouldn't be productive and would just come off as whiny, so I'm going to try to make this a comprehensive as possible and explain why I felt certain things went the way they did.
I'll start this reflective statement by explaining how the pandemic affected my project; I want to explain my thoughts on the story I settled on, before going into the characters I created, lastly I need to voice my opinions on what I ended up submitting before making my final reflection of the project as a whole.
Lockdown
Just to get this out of the way first. Did COVID-19 and the lockdown impact my project in any way? I feel it did, just not very much. Working from home has been something I have always struggled to do; even at school I was notoriously bad at doing homework; not because I can't do the work, but because I struggle to focus when I'm in the one environment that I view as my safespace.
Working from my bedroom creates big issues for me as things like my video game consoles are staring me in the face the whole time. Now, someone did suggest unplugging the games so I might focus on my work, but I would never do that because then I'd have no escape from work and that would stress me out to no end. I was relieved when we was allowed back into uni because I could return to the blue room, which I did. Over those last couple weeks at uni, I managed to do all my animation (scene, turnarounds and walk cycles) all from uni, because I can focus with little or no distractions.
Other than the issue of work environment, the fears created by the pandemic have taken a toll on my mental health which was deteriorating long before we went into lockdown, so I do not believe that the pandemic is solely responsible for this. However, I believe that it has made my situation worse, resulting in my fear of using public transport and the public in general; bearing in mind I live with vulnerable people and catching COVID my well have resulted in my worst nightmare, so this added anxiety didn't help in any way.
With that being said, I'm proud that I have produced the content that I have, given the restrictions from the lockdown. It is just a shame that I genuinely believe that I would have achieved far more had I been at uni rather than stuck in my bedroom.
The Story
Pandemic aside, I have many gripes with the story I ended up with. I want to believe that my main strength in the creative field is my story telling, I am proud of the stories I have created over the years, however, when it comes to explaining them to other people I often stumble over my own words and it becomes difficult to get my point across. I went into premise with a list of ideas and high hopes that I'd get to make one of them, all of my ideas were rejected, leaving me defeated. I know that Alan wanted me go outside of my comfort zone for more ideas, but in my opinion that didn't help. I don't know if Alan misinterpreted my ideas or if I didn't explain them properly, but what happened was I started going back down on the downward spiral mentally. It felt like the thing I actually believed I was good at had been thrown back in my face.
One of my ideas was the opening of a much grander story I've been working on since 2012, this was rejected due to it sounding too much like part of a much larger story rather than being a stand alone piece, which is true, but this actually became the basis for my final project. The original idea featured a vigilante storming into a bank and stopping a gang of bank robbers, before stealing something from the bank's vault himself. I hold quite a bit of resentment against Klepto-Man since to me he feels like a mockery of my original idea, but he works better as a stand alone, comedic, UPA style story. It feels watered down to me, and frustrates me because I was so excited for these final projects, but my motivation plummeted the longer I worked on a story that no longer felt like my own.
Despite that I am still proud of the scripts I wrote for Klepto-Man; which also plays into another issue, I put a lot more effort into the scripts than the animatic. I enjoy writing and I like building worlds and stories in words because they are easy for me to follow, this creates the conflict of this being a visual course and I struggle to turn my words and imagination into animatics. During the storyboarding and animatic stage I feel like most of the misunderstandings Alan and I had were due to me being unable to convert my ideas into clear animatics.
I struggle with timing and I have little eye for detail, which results in clunky animatics with off timing and floaty animation. This project really has shown me what I struggle with specifically, but I have no idea how to address these issues due to them not being skill based but mental.
Towards the end of the project I flirted with the idea of scrapping the story and replacing it with a series of slapstick skits & sketches. My thought process was being dictated by events prior. One of the issues Alan kept having with my animatics was that they felt too static, while they weren't static in my imagination, I've already explained the problem there; I was also having issues with voice actors, specifically the people I spoke to suddenly stopped responding to my messages, I don't know what happened. Either way, I decided to axe talking completely, entirely scrapping my script. Because I enjoy world building, the world of Klepto-Man has been something I've been considering and I believe that the world could be wacky enough to house Looney Tunes or even ASDFmovie style skits and sketches. My idea was to create a series of gags that would lead up to Robert Banks getting the idea of robbing the bank, effectively turning the gags into a prequel of sorts, renaming the original idea to "The Misadventures of Klepto-Man: Bank's Heist", which I intended to produce later. However this idea also ended up being scraped, with me resorting to reimagining the original Klepto-Man script into being wordless. While I have planned out the entire thing in my head, getting it into Maya, became my priority before time ran out.
As evidenced by my submission, I only managed to produce one scene of the final idea.
The Characters
Despite the story and characters not being the same as my original story, I don't hate them. While my original character was a lot grittier, Klepto-Man is designed to be a blatant parody of Superman. After Alan introduced me to Roger Ramjet, he became the base for Klepto-Man.
In terms of how the character came out in Maya, Klepto-Man looks very close to how I had envisioned him in 2D, which is very good. His face was slightly confusing to work around, but I figured it out. The cape was my first proper exploration into ncloth. I do find it funny that there is a tutorial for the exact situation of a hero's cape on the website, so that worked out well for me.
The villain, Robert Banks, was developed to work alongside Klepto-Man's UPA inspiration. I wanted Banks to be a very stereotypical, mustache twirling villain, and I feel like I achieved this. Banks was the other character to feature ncloth, however it proved to be more complex that I'd like, but I did eventually figure it out.
The three henchmen characters, Lenny, Denny & Benny; were originally not meant to be their own individual characters, however as the story developed, so did the henchmen. I used the dynamic of slapstick trios, such as the three stooges, as a template for these characters.
Truth be told I am proud of what I have achieved with these five characters. Going straight from Jet Pack Jones as the only character I had ever modeled/rigged to designing, modelling, skinning and rigging five unique characters, I think that I have accomplished something here.
Submission
I am disappointed that I didn't get to finish my entire project by submission. However, my disappointment is overshadowed by the my pride in what I have completed. My depression has gotten much worse over the last year, resulting in entire weeks where I could barely bring myself to get out of bed, however I still managed to finish with completed characters, walk cycles and a finished scene. To me, the work I have achieved shows that I do have the know how to produce animated projects, I just need to work on refining and fixing the mess that is my time management.
However, I feel burnt out and need a break after this, so improving my skills can wait until I'm back in a better place of mind.
