Final

2nd Semester

What is 1 valuable takeaway I learned? 

   
     Coming into this class, I didn't know a lot about what I was doing concerning the programs we were using and what we'd be doing. I knew the basics, but I didn't know everything there was. I had a background of Adobe Photoshop,  After Effects and Illustrator.

My biggest takeaway in technology was getting a deeper understanding of multiple different programs. These programs included, Adobe Photoshop and Maya. We used both of these programs in just about all of our projects. usually just working with one was more common.

For collaboration, my most valuable takeaway was learning how to be quick when doing projects. It's important to keep up with the people I'm collaborating with. In our most recent project we worked in a team to accomplish a short film involving all that we learned in e-Com this year. While we were collaborating we decided what each of us should take on and all of us tried to work at the same pace so no one gets to far ahead and help each other out if someone were to get behind.

For communication my most valuable takeaway was that I learned that when talking its important to pick out the roles and decide who will perform them. Like I mentioned in the last paragraph, we worked on a project that involved collaboration. The main topic at the beginning was about what roles should each of us take on. These roles would of course have to suit our skills and I got put into the Maya role.

For project management I learned that it's just as important to set dates of when you want a specific part finished. In my last project we were in teams and this proved to be very useful. I was to finish all the objects we were going to need to be using by the end of our third day of working.

For Leadership I learned that having good control of what's going in in a team project is incredibly important if everything is to go well. Depending how big and what the project is depends if a leader is actually necessary, however. In my last project with only three of us working we didn't assign a leader of sorts, but rather kept reporting to each other where we were at so that we wouldn't get lost at any point.

Strengths / Weaknesses

     For my strength I've learned a lot about Maya and I believe the program is a big strength of mine as I've done well on the projects concerning it. Maya was a hard program to learn, it dealt wit 3-D objects that had to be manipulated precisely. The animating part of Maya was slightly easier, depending on how exactly the object had to be moved. The more complex the objects motion the more difficult it would prove to animate. Another strength would be Adobe After Effects. I like how I did on he explosion projects. I thought they came out well for a novice.

     As a weakness, I didn't do so good with Adobe Photoshop. I often confused layers and forgot to name the layers different in general. This made animating in Adobe After Effects difficult. Since then I've improved by checking the layers I'm in much more often. But I still need to fix that up more as I continue to make repeated mistakes of putting the wrong thing into the wrong layer.

What will I do with what I learned?

    After learning everything that I have from this class, I am interested in learning more. I will continue to apply what I learned into any situation or assignment that is necessary. What I'm hoping to do is to actually get the adobe programs for personal use and continue to use it for experimentation with I have learned from this class. Animation has been very useful for teaching me how to create and use original characters. With that in mind, I want to create more characters ad go on with animating them. I also want to continue working with Maya as it's very hard to use and I'm hoping I might be able to apply what I learned from there into a new program.

What would I change? 

     Given the chance to change anything, I would've put more effort into my photoshop projects. In these projects it was common for me to mix up layers and forget to name them. I didn't think it was important but that was a large fault of mine. In Adobe After Effects there are many different ways to command a composition to move or change opacity, etc. When using a lot of compositions it can get messy to work with. if I could change anything about that I would've liked to try to memorize all the short cut commands to only access one command at a time rather than all of them at once. In Maya I would want to change small things. In one project I didn't align the walls perfectly to the project so I'd want to change that. Also I never did a lot of grouping in Maya, so I'd like to change that too, to see whether it would affect my projects in a good or bad way.

Conclusion

     I've learned a lot in this class from when I first started it. I've gained a lot of valuable information concerning the many types of guarantee's. Through the projects we did to complete everything I gained a lot of new information about how to make different shapes in Maya and how to use green screens in Adobe Photoshop. My favorite project was the snowflake project, where we used Maya to make snowflakes, which was very fun to do. Of course, this is all thanks to my teacher, Mr. Olsen.


Maya projects:

Adobe After Effects: