The Classical Elements: Presenting my Ideas/Interim Crit.

Today I presented my ideas and visuals to a group of three other students. I was expecting to get to college and present to the whole class, and even though I don't particularly like speaking in front of large audiences, I was quite disappointed. I had prepared myself to talk to the whole class and was looking forward to trying to get used to the idea of public speaking, and to become more confident, both with presenting and speaking about my own work. I have only ever done this once on my Art Foundation course, and I spent most of the presentation staring at the floor and shaking, and this is something I want to get over.

I was also disappointed because I didn't get as much feedback as I was expecting to get, due to the small group. I feel this is partially my fault, as I didn't go into much detail when explaining my ideas because I was presenting to a much smaller group than what I was expecting, and the way we were doing so was very informal. I decided to skip a lot of my slides at the beginning of the presentation as I wanted to keep the discussion quite casual and to the point, as I no longer felt comfortable waffling on about my ideas in detail. Because of this, I would have liked to have presented to a larger audience, as I could have talked about my work in the way that I initially set out to and could have received better feedback. Having said this, I do appreciate the group listening to what I had to say, and the comments that they did give.

Matt raised a very good point at the end of my presentation. He asked if there was actually any point to the novelty number candle at the end. Not wanting to sound mean or bash my idea/character, he was simply pointing out that without that character the ending would be much more unexpected, as you would only find out that they are birthday candles right at the very end when the human character blows them out. It is definitely something that I am going to have to consider, as this will completely change the impact on the audience. The addition of the novelty number candle eases the viewer into the candles being extinguished, whereas without it the audience will be much more taken back. If I do decide to leave this character out of my animation, I'm going to have to think about what will take it's place. I could involve other candles with different personalities, or I could make the conflict between the existing characters last longer. Personally, I quite like the contrast between the normal and novelty candles, and think that the '5' is a nice addition to the storyline, as it also gives you insight to the human character's personality. I think it will be a good idea if I ask around and see which ending would be more desirable and go from there.

Other than that, there wasn't really anymore constructive feedback. My group seemed to like my character design, and they didn't have anything bad to say about my storyboard or animatic, so I guess that will do for me.