Goodbye Ricardo

So thats all my three GIFS finished! I'll be sad to see that back of Ricardo, but I'm sure I'll use him again for something else, he's too good to waste. 

Good points of this brief:

• The actual making of the GIFS was no where near as bad as I thought it would be! I'd built it up in my head to be this massive thing, like I usually do with anything that involves using Photoshop, but I need to start to realise that its never anything that can't be worked out. Also theres always someone around to point me in the right direction, but the only way I'll ever learn properly is by forcing myself into the deep in in briefs like this
• I tried something new and it worked! Usually I'd tend to stick to hand-drawn and very organic images for things like this that involve character design, but actually one of the highlights of this brief was using different media to see how my character changed with each new media used. The photography GIF was never something I would have done if I hadn't seen that purple blanket, and I was going to actually stick to what I've done before and make Ricardo out of clay for the 3D GIF, but I'm glad I ended up changing direction. I think the photography gave the GIF a new layer of DIY humour that couldn't have come across so well any other way
• Its got me thinking more about the process of character design as a whole. In fact at the beginning when we were having to whittle our designs down to the best one I was really struggling because I had too many that I wanted to use! I'm pretty sure the reason I ended up with so many I liked was because of the exhaustive way I roughed out my characters in the first place, getting a feel for each of their personalities. I'll definitely be revisiting a few of the best ones in the future.

Bad points of this brief:

• The idea behind the brief I couldn't fault at all, I think it was probably one of my favourites so far, it was just the way I dealt with it that wasn't the best. I think I could have given more thought to how my final character looked and moved before leaping into making my final GIFS, as this made some of them look a little static and jarred. This was mainly down to poor time management on my part at the beginning, I think I got too carried away roughing the characters and spent too long picking which one to take forward
• I also underestimated how many frames it would take to make a stop motion GIF look fluid. It turns out it takes A LOT. I did around 14 but that was way too few, so subsequently Ricardo's movements aren't as fluid as I'd hoped. Also had I left myself more time at the end of the module I could have gone back and added more frames afterwards but by the last few days I'd run out of time, again poor time-keeping