Visual Language Self Evaluation -- OUAN404

In which I complain about the same thing I have complained about in my previous two evaluations:

During this module I think I didn't push myself as hard as I could in terms of creativity. The Set, Series, Sequence task ended with some quite tame drawings of hats, in a style that I hadn't really developed. Once again I think initially starting to think of ideas for hats I didn't come up with many ideas that were much more than just quite plain illustrations, and then when I had an idea for the final animation, ended up drawing things which fit into that idea rather than continuing to try and explore. I often find it hard not to think about the end product straight away, and end up drawing things for a pre-determined outcome instead of playing around with different ideas and working out which ones work best. This is definitely what happened during Set, Series, Sequence in which the first frame of my final storyboard came into my head as soon as I began drawing hats, and didn't change much after that. I had a very strong mental image of it, but actually I think the rest of the storyboard turned out quite weak.

Similarly in Captain Character, after playing with primitives briefly and coming up with a few different characters that way, I decided on making a pirate. Very quickly I settled on a rough design and had to force myself to go back to the first stages of design, eventually ending up with lots of pirates of varying levels of menace - but still couldn't get my first idea out of my head, and the final product came out quite similar.

At the same time it is beneficial that I often have very strong ideas as soon as getting a brief - it means I can get to work very quickly, sometimes with a clear direction of where I want to go, but also a weakness which more often than not stops me from properly working out that direction before heading off.

I also struggled with blogging during this module. I feel sometimes like the blogging tasks in our briefs are very much geared to people who watch lots and lots of cartoons or animated films, and have an encyclopaedic knowledge thereof. When asked to "explore 3 animations and critically analyse them and identify how their use of composition, lighting, tone, texture, form, space and composition etc begin to tell an environmental story"(for example) I find it hard to think back over things I have already watched, and never get that "Oh, this film has a great use of ... " moment. I often find myself blindly trawling through the internet to find animations which particularly fit into a writing brief. I'm not sure whether it is my own interests, those of the course (or the majority of students the course sometimes feels geared to), or something else that made me find it this difficult.

Of all the modules this year, including Applied, PPP and COP, I have enjoyed Visual Language the least, in large part because of the work I produced not being quite as adventurous as I feel I should be. As I write this I am looking at a folder of work that, other than maybe one or two life drawings (a subject which I was already confident and comfortable in), I am not particularly proud of.