The Animated Self: Planning and Generating Ideas

For this brief we are required to produce a short 15-30 second animation that reflects myself and my interests. It could also be an opportunity for me to build on existing skills, or to widen my range of skills by experimenting further, and I can do this by creating an animation on pretty much anything I like. 

At first, I really liked the sound of this brief, as I have total freedom with what I produce, but I soon realised I had ZERO ideas. Since the majority of my previous briefs have given me a topic to work with or at least a title to base my animation around, I found it incredibly hard to think of something. So I began making notes and brainstorming. 

I thought about my strengths & weaknesses and began to consider the different ways in which I could produce the animation. I thought about what programmes/methods would be best to produce certain things (e.g. animated logos, a short cartoon, etc.) in hopes that I'd at least decide on what I wanted to make. I decided I didn't want this animation work to clash with my current project, so instead thought it would be best to stay clear of after effects and work in another way. I then realised that I only have just above a month to complete both projects, so I decided that it would be best to build on my existing strengths rather than be adventurous and take the challenge of learning new ones. As much as I would have liked to do this, I don't want to get too stressed by creating too much work for myself; I'll be able to do more experimenting in the Summer holidays anyway.

I decided that I'd like to practice animating movement, either by traditional means or digitally. This won't require me to do weeks of planning to solidify an idea for a storyboard so I won't be rushed for time, and this way I can also focus on my animating. I think this will be beneficial to me as I haven't done a great deal of moving sequences, so I can use this time to practice this skill, which I can then relate to future projects. The idea sounds quite simple but I think it could be a good opportunity for me to produce some good work, especially if I really focus on capturing movement accurately. 

The only thing left for me to do is to decide what movements I'm going to animate. I'm leaning more towards the human form as I feel this will be the most beneficial and exciting, and also because I really enjoyed my life drawing sessions and would like to continue with this. I have made a list of all the different actions I could choose to look at (for example, dancing, jumping, running) and I will decide on which I want to continue with when I collect the reference videos I will need to draw from. From these I can also work out how many I'm going to need to animate to meet the requirements of the brief.