Reviewing your own work

The Interaction unit was based working in teams to make a flash animation for our National Aquarium. We began this unit by starting with researching and planning. The first thing we did was visit the aquarium so the staff there could talk to us a bit about the aquarium, the fish and what they wanted us to do for them for this unit. For this unit we were put into teams of three and progressed by talking to each other and planning different ideas, this was very useful method of brainstorming and work particularly  well in my group. This allowed us have to different possibles ideas ready to create and finalised which we would find the most realistic and creative to design.
For research I looked into interactive art, majority on YouTube to generate some ideas for how we could make a creative, interesting and unique. I didn't gather much research as I was confident with the idea we went ahead with, which we came up with very early in the planning process. 


My idea was to use the main, big room in the aquarium as the focus of my animation, with the large tank. I took 360' photos which then can converted into a panoramic image in Photoshop then imported into my flash stage. Through the use of Flash tools, I was able to create a fully 360' spin image. To create animated fish, I used whatever image of a fish I had, put it into Photoshop, then used a tool called "Puppet Warp" which allows you to dynamically move parts of the image. This allowed me to move the fins of the fish. I created about around six different positions of the fish and it's moved fins, saved those images then imported them into flash where I could animate them together to create a dynamic animated fish. After finishing the panoramic image in flash, I could import the animated flash onto the stage. By putting the fish over the fish tank in the image, giving the impression they were in the tank and not just on top of the image.


What I like and enjoyed about this project for the biggest part, was doing this work for our National Aquarium. It was a good taste of what it's like doing work for a client. It was very engaging, allowing me to put use of idea generating, planning those ideas, working towards accomplishing those plans and also how to deal with any constraints that affected the development of my plan. Which I did encounter during this project. A few things during the early stage of development really setback the progress of my plan, forcing me to change the idea behind my plan considerably. This really affected the time I had for the development of the work for this project. Leaving it to be unfinished.


What I would do differently next time is ensure I had a plan with a 'Plan B' behind it, maybe a simpler version of my first plan, to setback on in case there were constraints with my main plan(like there were in my project). Whilst there was no choice in the matter. It would be professional if I could pick team members with the adequate skills for my idea requires. Having a team members with mutual skills in one area and none in the other required, or none at all for what the idea needs. It can really affect the development of the idea.