Working on Sweet Chilli overall was an informative experience; I learned a lot about the strengths and weaknesses in my usual approach of working, and I’m able to look back and see where I succeeded and where I would’ve done things differently.

There were elements of my production process that I feel went well, and that I can carry forward into future projects. Firstly, I managed to stay within all of my deadlines without burning out; Usually while working on my projects in the past I didn’t schedule in many breaks and I’d consistently get little sleep in order to finish things on time. While this way of working is effective for a short time, ultimately it isn’t sustainable and it ends up effecting the quality of my work; Going into Sweet Chilli, I established a healthier schedule for myself early on so that I could work an appropriate amount without overdoing it and facing any burnout by adding things like breaks and days off into my weekly plans. I feel this was successful; I was able to finish my animation early and have enough time for revisions and hand in submissions without ever wearing myself out. Moving forward I think I’ll continue to work in ways that prioritise my overall health alongside meeting deadlines.

Secondly, I feel that my design process for this animation was successful. I knew that I wanted to experiment with mixed media and collage, and that I wanted to find a way to make vastly different textures and imagery look coherent and like they belong in the same world. Through early experimentation and ongoing changes after feedback sessions, I feel that I was able to create a coherent and unique visual identity for the project. I’d also call my character designs the strongest element of the film; I put a lot of thought and research into the characters so that even the smaller details on them had some meaning and relevance, while also considering things like readability, silhouettes, colour and how animatable they would be, and I feel I ended up with a strong set of designs for the peace. I’m personally also happy with my sound design; I received negative feedback for sound design on my last short film, and so I put a lot of time and thought into the soundscape of this animation, and I was able to create one that I feel is effective.

There were a lot of elements of my film that I felt showed up my weaknesses, and that I’d also like to work on moving forward. Firstly, I was nervous and hesitant in starting this animation as I had initially planned to take a year out for DPS, and didn’t feel ready to make my final film; I think this anxiety ended up effecting the piece overall. When I didn’t get any places for the DPS year, my confidence toward animation was affected, and as a result I avoided any especially challenging animated shots throughout the storyboarding and animation process, as I didn’t feel confident enough to tackle things I was bad at out of fear that I wouldn’t finish on time, or that the film would look bad as a result. This caused a lot of the shots in Sweet Chilli to have very bland or centric composition, which makes the film feel a bit slower and more tame narratively than I was aiming for visually. I also feel that there aren’t a lot of strong or stand out pieces of animation for me to include in show reels; I feel I could’ve used this opportunity to try and improve more as an animator and to showcase my strengths, but I fell behind a little bit. In my opinion, my 2nd year film features better animation than my 3rd year film, which is regrettable.

Pacing is also something I struggled with during the process of making this film. I consistently didn’t time out my animatics very well as I was very focused on starting to animate early on, and as a result the first draft of the film ended up being 6 minutes, which was a lot longer than intended and drew out the narrative a lot, causing people to disengage in the middle of the film. I consistently received the feedback to make the film shorter and more snappy, but due to both lowered confidence and time restraints, I found it hard to both shorten the film and try to complete the rest of my animated shots as redrafting the story could’ve meant needing new animated shots and not using a lot of the ones I had already made; as a result, the finished film is a little longer than I wanted it to be, and I’m fearful that the duration of the film will bore people and cause them to click off of it before they finish it.

Moving forward, I’ll place a lot more importance on the animatic stage of the production pipeline; If I had created another draft before animating, I could’ve addressed both the pacing issues and the lack of many diverse or interesting shots. I feel I was impatient during the production process of this film and wanted to finish it as quickly as possible, but moving forward I’ll start to take things slowly, and carefully consider each part of the process before I move on and start animating. Looking back I feel that working on a team would’ve also been helpful in regards to these shortcomings; having someone else to help with pacing and composition could’ve allowed me to focus more solely on animation, and I could’ve benefited from having someone with greater compositional sense on the team as it would’ve pushed me to try and animate things outside of what I was comfortable with.

Overall I’m happy with my film, although there are a lot of shortcomings. I may not have created something I’d regard as my best work this time around, but I was able to experiment with things I was interested in and I can use this as a starting point and a motivation to do better moving forward, so I’d still call this a positive experience. I also feel that overall the film will appeal to the audience I’m targeting, and I’m excited and curious to post it online and see the reactions to it. I’m happy that I’m able to identify my weaknesses looking back, and I look forward to seeing how I can improve looking forward.