Minor Project: Reflective Statement

This first term/Minor Project has been a large challenge for me. I had to try to juggle two projects - YPGTTO and When - at the same time along with other aspects of my third year such as the thesis. Despite the stress surrounding them, I've really enjoyed working on both projects. I won't go into too much detail in regards to YPGTTO since I've already written a reflective statement about it, but I do feel that it's given me a great opportunity in regards to collaboration and enhancing my multi-tasking skills.

After Dysmorphia, I wasn't quite sure what I should do for my third year. I knew that I wanted to do something in regards to mental illness again because it's an important topic to me, but I had a lot of anxiety that I was going to be doing something too similar. With that in mind, I worked hard to make it honest and open about not just mental illness but different parts of my life overall. This has been a scary thing for me to do, but I feel it is important for me to express my thoughts and feelings for what they are and not what I think they should be. I didn't want to alter my project just because I fear what my family or other people I know may think, and I hope that will allow people to connect with it. I'm quite proud of my final poem because despite the anxiety that I felt about expressing my raw thoughts, was able to work through it. 

The poem and the voice-over were probably the two most difficult parts of my project (so far at least). I found it challenging to edit down my lists of phrases into a concentrated poem - almost everything felt important to me. That is why I think it was crucial that I was able to emotionally detach myself from certain parts of the project when needed, despite how personal it is. This too applies to the voice-over, since I needed to portray the emotions related to the lines of the poem without it being too rehearsed or dramatic. I'm not comfortable with acting or voice acting in any way, so being the voice-over for my film was stressful for me, but I hope that it creates more of an impact. I spent several hours in the sound booth creating dozens of recordings even though I felt awkward and uncomfortable...but I'm proud that I got there in the end.

Since this film is quite abstract, I initially struggled to see how I would create anything. I tried to remember that was how I felt when I was working on Dysmorphia as well, so I think that helped calm my nerves and pushed me to keep experimenting. I initially worked quite literally when trying to express my poem's lines, but later on I let myself work on more abstract representations. I felt myself most drawn to manipulating Maya's height map/displacement attributes to achieve different materials. I also liked spending time tweaking different settings on the AiStandardSurface shader to create different effects. I feel that these experiments with tweaking the shaders and playing around with the displacement resulted in the most interesting imagery. 

Part of my initial struggled to see and structure the work that I was making. Once I was told to look at glaze tests, things began to feel and look more organised. I also feel that things began to come together better once I looked at medication and food labels and used that as influence for my labelling system. I felt that the reference to food/medicine fit in with what my animation discussed. I also feel it is important that I include keeping track of numbers and values because that also relates to the obsession with counting calories, weight, and my other habit of counting and obsessively keeping track of things. I liked my animated label test, and I wonder if animated numbers may be a good thing to experiment with in the future (for example, overlaying animated numbers over other objects or projections). 

A few times I felt I began to over-complicate things. For example, before I began trying to consider representing the lines in my poem more abstractly, I tried to realistically portray bleach using Bifrost liquid simulation. I now know that this may be over complicating my processes, and that simpler methods may provide more impact anyway. Saying that, I feel that using software such as Substance Designer and Substance Painter may be useful at times, but I be mindful I'm not using for the sake of it. Designer was helpful for creating ice and may be useful for other interesting displacement maps and some other materials, but I don't need to use it for everything.

The first thing I want to do after this hand-in is to contact a music composer so I can collaborate with him/her to create some music/soundscapes for my film. I've wanted to do this in the past, so I'm excited to have the opportunity now to do it. I was given one person to contact so far, but I have to continue searching since I want to see what my options are. I want to begin experimenting with camera movements more because I think that the camera movement, camera distortion (ex. focal length), and it's relationship to the molecule will be important. I also want to experiment a bit more with the lighting.

I plan on working more with the displacement maps because I think those where my most interesting tests. I think that software such as Mudbox will be helpful when creating those maps...for example, I could create a stencil for crystal-like structures and sculpt them into a sphere in Mudbox then export out a displacement map.

Even though I was never worried about becoming bored while working on this project, I'm relieved that I still feel eager and excited to experiment and create something unique and hopefully impactful. While there are various aspects of this project that still need a lot of work and attention, I'm looking forward to it.