The last few days before the deadline were mostly spent on fixing some smaller issues I had with the animation, as well as adding the sound.

First, I added some extra nodes to the hologram, to make it appear “fuzzier” and more like a real light rather than a solid transparent block.

I then animated those nodes to make it flicker between slightly different opacities, to give the impression that it was glowing. I was hoping to make it look fancier through After Effects or other compositing software, but given the time, I found this looked just fine and moved on.

With all the visuals done, I moved onto the sound. I largely scrapped the sound effects used in my animatic, only keeping a couple of lesser sounds to be reworked and edited to better fit the scene. Beyond those, I gathered up a new array of sounds (again from freesound.org).

My saving grace ended up being a sci-fi track I found on the website that (with some tweaking) matched perfectly with my animation, both in timing and feel: it elevated my animation’s quality by a wide margin, and I’m glad I stumbled onto it after a long while of searching for a good background track.

An afternoon of sound editing later, and my video was done with a day to spare. I submitted everything the evening before the deadline, calm and satisfied with my work, two things I rarely get to say about a uni project at the same time.

And on Friday the 11th, we got to visit Blink Industries for our final viewings! The building we were given the tour of was not the actual animation headquarters, which was a shame, but it was still a lovely place, and getting to see our animations projected onto a big screen was fun!

The feedback for my animation was a lot better than I was honestly expecting. I was fairly happy with my work, but I was surprised at how much everyone seemed to like it: I might need to start being a little less hard on myself. Still, everyone else’s project were amazing too, and it was a great experience all around.

Overall, what I was the most satisfied with about this project was probably my time management: making a schedule and actually sticking to it is quite unusual for me, and I’ll make sure to remember how good it felt to keep doing it with future projects!

Beyond that, I’m pretty happy with my project as a whole. I took the brief and made it my own, sticking to what I know I like making, but pushing myself to increase the overall quality in every aspect, from the animation and backgrounds to the sound design and compositing.

My biggest hope now is that Blink Industries actually gets around to posting our projects on their social media, as it would admittedly be a great way for my work to be seen by a lot of people.

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Being completely honest, right now is a bit of a stressful time. Most job applications I’m sending are not getting any responses, and the ones I do get are just telling me they won’t be needing me. I’m behind on working days for the year, and the constant rejection is starting to get disappointing. I can see now that I went into the year with higher hopes than what was realistic, and it’s easy for me to start believing that I’m just not good enough.

Still, I know this issue can’t be fixed by anyone other than myself. A talk with Maliha and other tutors gave me some ideas on where to apply next, so that will be a good step forward. The SIPS project pitch is also coming up, and I’ve started working on pre-production for my idea, with character sheets and turn-arounds to both show my concepts and add to my portfolio. I’ll keep being persistent with sending job applications, and do my best to improve on what I’ve got. With even more hard work and a bit of luck, I’m hoping things will turn around by the end of the year. Here’s to the future!