Well we’re finally at the end of my time for this project. I'm going to be honest when I say it isn’t exactly what I had in mind as it was a lot harder than I could have ever expected. I did spend a lot of time on this project so I'm proud of the outcome regardless. This was also a great experience for me as I don’t think I have ever spent so much time on anything in my life and honestly it is difficult for someone like me to work on the same thing for so long. There were times where I got frustrated and others where I was extremely inspired and excited. Although I was not able to achieve the final outcome I aspired to whether it was because of circumstances or different challenges, I’m happy with having chosen this as my final independent project for VAM. To say that these past few months have been difficult would be an understatement and for the difficulty level of this project I think I was actually able to achieve quite a lot and I can honestly say that I will miss being able to spend time like this.
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I am once again back to just saying that as much as I would like to go into detail about my project and progress, I simply can’t. So far I am about a bit past halfway done which doesn’t sound like a lot but I have been working really hard on it. I am almost done blocking in all my scenes which means that I can get started on editing and coloring soon. I do however believe that I could definitely have a lot more done but every once in a while I get slightly frustrated and overwhelmed with all of it. That might also be because I am also dealing with other classes and university applications, so I have a lot going on. Despite that I continue to work really hard and even if I don’t manage to finish this project or just not have it be as amazing as I would want it, I know I’ll still be proud of all the work I have put into it
As predicted the progress on this project has been slow, nothing I can’t handle of course, but definitely a bit frustrating. During these last two weeks I have begun rough sketching my first few scenes and almost completed the opening shot for the short film. Thankfully because of all the work I put into my story boards during the first few weeks, I do have a clear outline of where I'm going with the story so laying down the foundation has been more or less simple. As I work through the animation process I am finally starting to get an understanding of how to use my program to its best ability as well as finding new shortcuts that are normally used for animating just to make the process go a little smoother and faster as I am dealing with a time limit. The work I’ve done so far is small in comparison to the grand scheme of the project, but I have yet to be discouraged and I will continue to work hard on it but I do admit that some days have been more productive than others. It’s not like I'm not trying, it's just some days are slow but I believe that's just part of the process. I’ll continue to work now and we’ll see where I’m at in another two weeks.
This year my independent project has been less tedious than last year. Unlike last year when I did a series of paintings, I decided to experiment with collage work this year. The more I work o this project, the more I realize that my worst enemy has been time. Let me explain; see, it isn’t that I’m not going to finish my project in time; it's more of a personal expectation I had that I would hopefully create at least one more piece in my series. So far, everything’s been going according to plan; there was a while I was even ahead of schedule, which got my hopes up. Still, unfortunately, last week, I lost some time as I was away for a couple of days, and although it was not that long, it was still significant enough to put me slightly behind. Moving on from my time restraint, my actual process for this project has been pretty straightforward. I am pretty proud of myself for experimenting with a different medium this year. Collages aren’t difficult, but they are tedious and time-consuming; if you want to do them correctly, at least that is one thing I’ve learned so far. Honestly, my progress hasn’t been very exciting; I have been starting by printing my edges first, which is the opposite of what I would do in a regular painting. But since I’m creating a black frame on each piece, I find it better to start like that so I can calculate where to put my collage pieces. The one thing that is the same as the painting progress has been that I always create my background before the main focus of each piece; this is just a necessity because it's easier to go over things than to work around them. Overall my project has been nothing less than interesting this year, and I believe it will be worth it in the end, but I guess we’ll see. On Thursday December 16, W.H.Croxford hosted an event where my classmates and I were able to showcase some of our work from this year so far. Personally I was very proud of what I was able to put into the show, I got a lot of positive feedback on a lot of my pieces from family and friends. I believe that I worked hard and achieved a product that impressed myself and my audience. As a group the event ran fairly smoothly and as I walked around I was able to see the reactions to our showcase as a whole being mainly positive the only struggle we had was getting people in the room to watch the grade 10’s small films and even though I unfortunately was not able to stick around long enough to see the reactions once people started to go in, I have heard from some of my classmates that even those reactions were positive. If I were to change anything about the work we presented as a group, I would say that as a whole we could have used more time to work on our towers and although the outcome was pretty good, I believe it could have been so much better and less stressful if we had more time. I would also say that it was unclear where the work the VAM 20’s did was located as all the VAM 10’s stuff was displayed in the hallway instead of room. Other than that I think the entire night was a success and all the academies were able to put their best work out there and give meaning to it.
After two months of a lot of hard work, I have finally finished my independent project. When I started, I knew that this assignment would be challenging to say the least, but I was willing to take it on as a challenge.
Every time I started a new painting, I faced the same hesitation and issue making the first step, but at the same time, they each had their own struggles. When it came to the first painting, one of my grandmother’s, I struggled slightly with getting the nose just right. There was always something I wanted to fix and was just not getting right, but eventually, I ended up with a compromise because I had to move on if I wanted to finish it by the due date. For my second painting, I had to paint it out of order because I hadn’t quite found the right picture for my mom’s painting, so I decided to move on and paint my sister instead. When it came to that painting, I had the most challenging time finding the right skin tone. I learned that my sister has a very different skin tone than most of my family because she is quite darker compared to my grandma, so I spent a lot of time in my first week of that painting just working and changing that colour. After that struggle, I moved on to my third and final painting. This painting was probably the most complicated and most manageable painting I did. The first struggle was finding the photo that took me a while, and I had to look through many old photo albums. After I finally found the image, it honestly didn’t take me long to get started, and it was pretty easy to find the right colours for it. Although once I got to the end of it, something didn’t seem quite right about it, so I had to go back in and fix many minor mistakes, especially around the face shape. Overall I’m actually pleased with what I achieved; of course there are little things here and there that I wished I would have done better on, but I worked hard, and I’m proud of my work. Although next year I want to expand my horizons and take a break from painting, so I might do something digitally. But for now, this project a great experience for me. So far, this project has been challenging, to say the least. It started very well. I was on track and didn’t have many setbacks. In fact, my first portrait was surprisingly easy, and I was able to finish that one in the span of the two weeks that I set in my timeline. I started with my grandma, and I think the reason that she was a little easy was that there weren't many details to her. Maybe that was because the photo I was using was really old, but overall, everything about her was straightforward and didn’t make life difficult for me. After that, I moved on to my sister, and I’m a little behind, to say the least because there was a big difference between my sister and my grandma. My sister is a little harder to paint as she doesn’t really look like grandma at all, she has more details to her face, but the most challenging part has been colour matching her skin tone. She is a lot darker than most of my family if I’m honest, so it has been a tough time trying to reach that and just trying to get it close enough. I’m at a point that it’s starting to get there, but it still needs a lot of work and time put into it. Luckily for me, spring break is coming up, so I’ll take the painting home and try to work on it because I want it to be done correctly. I still have a long way to go, and this project has definitely caused me a few issues, but I am determined to finish it and make it something I can be proud of. I knew when I started it that it was never supposed to be easy; good things never are, especially when it’s something so close to my heart. I know everything will work out in the end, even if it doesn’t look like it now, but I have high hopes. |
AuthorJust a high school student making a blog Archives
January 2023
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