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Professional Practice - My Career Planning Strategy

My Career Planning Strategy Self-Reflection on Academic Attainment I am a graduating Digital Media Design student at the University of Hertfordshire. In the past three years, I have learned and used many practical software in the design field and gained more knowledge in different aspects such as graphic design, animation, illustration, web design, UX design, video editing, 3D modelling, game design, etc. By learning and using the software to create works, I have gained an understanding of different design production processes and some necessary knowledge, which will be very useful for my future work. I expect to graduate with second-class honours or third-class honours. Although my grades could be better, I am not afraid of not finding a job; I believe that if I start from a low level, most companies will be willing to hire me. Personal Values and Motivations I developed my career in design because I like art very much and have loved drawing since I was a child. Growing up, I realized...
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Degree Project: Evaluative Post

The project does not realise the idea and ambition I wanted to explore at the start. Although I think the project has successfully delivered the story by having clear scenes and actions of the characters, I am not sure whether the audience will be able to understand the meaning of the story as it was short and not having narrative. The quality of the project is not high, I think the drawings are not looking very well and the animations are not smooth and enough. The interaction between characters are not enough. A lot of movies by Ghibli Studio and Miyazaki had influenced the project. Therefore, comparing to Ghibli Studio's artworks, I think the use of colour is close to similar to Ghibli Studio's artworks. but the drawing of the backgrounds of my project is not good enough, the backgrounds of Ghibli Studio's are very detailed, realistic. Whereas my project has very simple and rough drawings, the backgrounds mostly still have the lines on them and Ghibli Studio's does n...
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Degree Project: Animation (5)

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Colouring In the process of colouring the whole animation, I spent around 1 week, more than 14 hours per day to complete. In this process, not only colouring the frames, I also drew and redrew a lot of backgrounds. This process was very repeatedly. There are different ways for me to create the lights and shadows: 1. colouring frame by frame, 2. create a clipping mask on a track above the coloured one and create the shadow, however the shadow will not move. I used both of the methods, the first one gives a better feeling of hand-drawing but might look flickering, the second one is faster and easier, but does not look detailed. For most of the scene in the first half I drew frame by frame, but for the last half, I used the second method, I did not know that I can do this while colouring the first half, but then I found out that different tracks can be masked and turn into a different colour mode. Audio For the sound of the animation, I was not sure what should I do. I looked up on Artlis...
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Degree Project: Animation (4)

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 Linework 4 This is the part that I drew in Dreams, I drew the canvas and the old man, I simply traced the man using my original drawing of the man. I trickly covered the hand with the canvas to reduce some workload of animating. I also created the scene based on the drawing above, where the girl peeks her head and try to see what the old man is painting. I only drew the girl with a curious face then keyframed her by rotating and moving. After that, I drew two paintings using Procreate, those drawings can be referred to Dali's painting and Edward Hopper's painting. My thought was to pick some famous paintings and draw them, I picked these two as I thought they were very famous and relatively easy to draw as I did paint some copies back in the days I was doing A-Levels. I then animated a white block moving up to reveal those painting in front of the character. The grass was also drawn before colouring as I needed a better understanding to place the characters. After creating all...
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Degree Project: Animation (3)

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Linework 3 I used the whole room scene here to give a better sense of the situation. Instead of animating the whole action of the character jumping down the bed, I skipped it and only animated the part she was scared when the creatures jump down from the chair. As you may see a weird part where the character disappears after she shocked, my idea is to close up on those creatures fleeing away to the balcony so when it comes to colouring, I will make the change. Next, is the creatures jumping down from the balcony, I animated the towel/paper as they fall. Then, the character runs and check on the creatures on the balcony. The animation of the creatures falling down is simple, I drew the shape of it and keyframed it.  Next, I created these, both of the characters crossing the street. I roughly drew the creatures shape and keyframed the motion. For the main character, I animated the door opening and her running out. The next part is the alley part, where the creatures run into and the ...
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Degree Project: Animation (2)

  Linework 2 I recorded a video of my hand putting down the Apple pencil, then rotoscoped it. The process was very similar to the last rotoscoping part I did, I did not fully rotoscoped, but drew in-betweens.  In this part, for the first half, which is a bit different from the previous one, I added some action and emotion for the character. For the second part, I made a close up of the character. I tried to make her head kind of facing down a bit, but its looking weird at the moment. Maybe it will look better after coloured. The next part is the character sleeping in the bed, I spent hours testing and experimenting the animation of the head moving up. After making the animation of her head moving, I had to also draw the animation for her hair as she laid down. For the body part, I only moved it up every frame, I actually did not make any changes, the only thing that has changed frame by frame is her neck. I wish I could animate the pillow more in detail as the character laid d...
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Degree Project: Animation (1)

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Linework 1 After creating all the character designs and storyboard, I started to work on the actual animation, starting with the linework. I created everything using Procreate and Procreate Dreams. These three scenes were created in early March. First scene: I tried to work on the scenes of the main character in the room first. My method was to place the original design of the character in drawing of the room, and change the scale of the character to fit the size. Then I draw a sitting pose of her based on the original drawing. I also cropped her arm and rotate it to make it looks like she is holding the brush and painting.  I tend to draw the first and the last frames of an animation first, then I keep drawing the in-betweens of the animation or the pose until the animation looks smooth and "make sense" to me. In this video you can also see that I drew a new design of the room. The reason why I did this is because I thought the first one with a big canvas and stand in the co...
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