A short reflection about the entire project.
This was a really fun project, we had a lot of fun as a team and I think the installation turned out to be very fun as well. Firstly, working with people from different countries is very interesting. Sometimes a little too interesting that it took our attention away from the project and started to talk a lot about culture.
We all are interested in the project and that really helped with the drive of our team.
But we started building and realizing our concept too late. We had to pressure cook ourselves these last two weeks and work extra hard to get things done.
Other than that I think the last two weeks were very well planned for me.
This project I worked on a lot of different stuff. I worked together with Thom on the Stylesheet and created a nice colorful styling for our installation with a lot of personality. I have also used my animation skills to assist in some videos, but mainly to create the interface and bring it to life. I had some specific challenges to make the animation fit the weird spherical screen right but I figured it out and it turned out great!
I wasn’t as much a speciality guy in this project. I took more task upon me than the tasks were I was comfortable with. Which is not a problem to be honest, I learned a lot from it. For instance I worked a lot on soldering and hardware.
What I really liked this project was working together with Thom to communicate with sponsors and the client. This was very useful to me because this is something where I wanted to learn more of.
I think I have also improved in teamwork and communication, when there is miscommunication I try to backtrack to see what was wrong and try to not make the same mistake again.
I haven’t done as much animating as I’d like to. There were still elements that I wanted to animate for the promotional videos but there wasn’t enough time, or it was rather poorly planned. But at least I’d animated all the cutscenes on the installation itself, which was a unique and new experience.
I’m happy how the installation has turned out. I talked a lot with Margit about the experience of the installation and I really tried to push it, which was a succes in my opinion. It’s colorful, bold and loud (if you want it to be). The music added bring a lot of atmosphere and wonder to the story Thom wrote. The planet designs of Andre really looked cool and the promotional videos of Øyvind really tied the story together.
Other than that the concept is also technically very sturdy thanks to Iza.
And Vasil was like the gluten that holds the entire installation together with concept drawings, building and 3D stuff.
Next time there are a lot of things we have to do better, but most things are all connected to one main thing: Planning. Only after many, many conversations with the scrum teacher we slowly got to the point that our planning was on point. He also helped us a lot with our communication issues. When the planning and communication got better we really started to work hard. (But also the deadline was just two weeks from then so we had to). But that isn’t just a team problem, I personally struggle to get my own planning right and I definitely learned a lot about myself and planning this project.
Written by Jay-Cee,
@appleflapjc
Project Fat 