My essential questions were How does street art impact NYC, from its culture to its residents as well as How I can further my animation skills through this form of storytelling.

 

With Senior Project coming to an end, it’s time to reflect on my process, thus the prompts of analyzing with ‘metacognition’. Through this project, I discovered that working alone for 20 hours a week is a very difficult task. Even when I have my own animation studio in the future, I’ll be working with people, and people make things easier in all honesty. But as this was an independent project it was a good exercise. It became very clear early on my strengths and weaknesses. 

 

In terms of strengths, when I have a flow of work, it goes really well. I can get a lot done when I’m focused. And in addition, I feel my actual artistic abilities have been improving so I’m proud of that. On the other hand, trying to contain motivation, especially in a time like this is almost impossible. Creativity flourishes when you are able to be in many different environments over the span of a month, rather than being secluded to just the kitchen, living room, and bedroom. I figured out very quickly that I need to be out in the world. I also learned that staring at a computer for hours on end severely hurts my eyes and that being hunched over does not help my back. I have a bad habit of procrastinating to avoid doing my work, and though I always get things done, for some reason I prefer to cram rather than use all the time accessible to me.

 

This reflection better connects to the second half of my essential question: How I can further my animation skills through this form of storytelling. What don’t I know? Well, I think this can best be seen in my product. I still don’t know how to quickly and effectively animate in a short span of time (I feel), and because a large part of the project had to be cut out (the actual filming) I had to rely on my own animation completely.

 

All in all, I learned about my limits, but I’m working on them.