Tutorial_self initiated project

I'm now into the second week of working on my self initiated brief. After exploring my ideas with my tutor, we decided it would be a good idea to start running some animation tests. I found that as much as i do love getting down to rigging and animating in flash, i would not get enough time to execute my own goal. The tests took up a lot of time, and wasn't even near what i wanted to achieve. After a rather long night i decided on changing the direction of my self initiated brief.

I still want to adopt the ideas i pointed out in my presentation, but tackle a different concept. Which is something i was pondering over summer, and that is an animation based on a gambling/casino theme. This could be a title sequence or a short feature animation. I feel that this would be a more realistic goal to set.

So how did this tutorial effect my choices on the self initiated brief?
Throughout the tutorial we discussed the strengths and weaknesses of my idea:

The strengths were that the concept of my idea (birth to death) was a good foundation for a story or progression.

The weaknesses are that when putting this idea into production i will be diving into a lot of techniques that i am not familiar with and will struggle with such things as character design and animating elements. Of course i have experience with animation, but not enough to confidently tackle this brief.

With this in mind i went home and started on some tests for a scene. (Character floating through space) And did find it rather difficult and time consuming, as many decisions have to be made over the animation, paying attention to lots of different elements of the character. Don't get me wrong i loved designing and animating this little fella! But for the sake of meeting my deadline with a fully produced animation, i must save this idea for another time.



So overall the tutorial helped a lot, and was definitely a good idea to agree on running tests before putting my idea into production. (something to remember for the future!)
Im now ready to start running more tests on my gambling/casino theme, and see if i can reach a middle ground, in terms of designing my piece and animating it according to the deadline.