Presentations

 

 3D Animation

The Task 

-- During my first lesson in "Communication Skills for Digital Media", we were put into groups and given a subject to research. The subject my group was given was "3D Animation". Together, we had to prepare a presentation then deliver it the following week. Presentation complete, here is my reflection on our group’s delivery.

Working effectively as a group

-- I felt that, despite our troubles, we did work effectively as a group. We held a number of group discussions before the presentation and created our PowerPoint together. By working as a group, we came up with the points to discuss and what to include in our PowerPoint. No problems occurred during the initial group meetings and no group member became missing, therefore I felt we worked effectively together. However, maybe if we had arranged more group meetings and discussed the presentation in more detail we would have been more successful.

Contributing to the task

-- We each talked about a different slide in the presentation, while we created the PowerPoint as a group; therefore no one was left doing nothing, we each contributed. 

  

Problems

-- The problems we encountered developed in the presentation. Very little problems occurred during our group discussions and the making of the PowerPoint. It was only during the presentation where things seemed to go downhill, mainly because of our lack of rehearsal.

Research and content

-- We decided, as a group, to carry out our initial research individually. In our first group discussion, we thought about types of 3D animation and decided to look further into the making and design of the popular Toy Story 3. Hopefully, with this topic, everyone would find what we were saying more interesting. 

   At first, we decided to look specifically at one character (Slinky Dog), showing the design process behind it, starting from the influence of the animation character's design (James Industries' “Slinky” toy), to the final outcome. However, at our next group meeting, a member of our team had found an interesting step-by-step process of creating a single frame for Toy Story 3. After reading this guide, we felt that this would be more effective to discuss. But we didn’t just want to jump straight into Toy Story, so at first we decided to discuss the history of 3D animation.

Improvement

-- To improve the group’s preparation we could have rehearsed our presentation. Because we didn’t rehearse, a number of issues developed during our presentation. For example, our group became confused at who was supposed to be talking about one certain slide, which arose a few problems during our presentation. By rehearsing our presentation beforehand we could have stopped the issues that arose.  

Visual Aids

 -- We did create a PowerPoint that made effective use of visual aids, displaying images as we discussed them. However, to improve we could have added more style to our visual aids, as they appeared quite basic.