When I started this unit I had one major goal in my mind, to improve my animation skills as much as possible. Over last year the feedback I kept getting on my work was that my performance was stiff and boring. As a performance animator, it's important to be able to animate many different people with different personalities as well as be able to show the emotions the characters are feeling. I did an animation over the summer but I felt like both of the characters in it were behaving in the same way. The first thing I did when we started this unit was an exercise in which different personalities were reacting to the same situation. I decided to use the prompt of waiting for someone who's late. The first person was calmer and collected but the second one had a more firey personality. I think the animation itself could use more work but I did a good job of showing their personalities. I did a few rotoscopes of animated scenes to see how exactly I will need to exaggerate the poses to get the movements to look more cartoony. 

For the remainder of this unit, my goal was to practice as much as possible. I tried finding different audios that I can animate. I wanted to practice my lip-synch animation as well as my performance animation. I am very happy with how my lipsynch looks now.

I learned a few things while working on these animations. Sometimes less is more, the characters don't need to be constantly moving it's okay to have pauses and sometimes they are necessary. When I started this unit I thought that studious wanted to see complex animations with a lot of movement. Later when we started going to studio visits I found out that they wanted you to be able to show weight in your work and to have a detailed understanding of the 12 principles. Sometimes what gets people jobs is the simplest animation in their showreel, as long as it's animated well. This made me pay more attention to these things. 

When receiving feedback, there were a few things that were pointed out in my work. Arcks, overlap and followthrough, slow in and slow out and line of action. I tried paying more attention to these principles. I kept getting told that my spine was too straight, so I started focusing on exaggerating it. At the end of the unit, I stopped getting comments about the line of action and arcs, which I took as a positive note. I am very proud of the progress I have made this term. I even tried to do a few character designs on the side, since this is another area I have an interest in. 

I think my work has improved immensely since last year. Now my animations have more character to them and they don't seem as stiff. In the future, I will try to pay more attention to the principles that were highlighted in my feedback.