Short Project Reflection

From looking at other people's projects, I learned a lot about the potentials of including art with one's animated text (either photographs or drawings).  I didn't do that in my own work, and I don't intend to in my final project, either, because I prefer to focus exclusively on the power of (animated) words, but I did like some of the effects, some of which I didn't previously imagine.
As far as my own project goes, I think I learned something about controlling text speed to convey an idea.  We saw an example of text being flashed on the screen one word at a time with "Dakota," but I think that text speed didn't change too much throughout.  I wanted mine to be fast at some parts and slow at others.  I liked what I learned about how this effect can look, but most of all I had to consider what I would do if people said the last half of my animation was too fast.  Part of me wanted to slow it down as a result, but another part of me thought that would go against the entire purpose of the animation.  I ultimately decided that even not being able to read every single word of fast-paced text doesn't prevent readers from getting the general idea, which is all I wanted to convey.  I think I learned how to convey, through animated text, the way someonespeakinginahugerushoffrustratedwordscansoundlike.

If I had more time, I'd either add more of the sort of thing I had at the beginning where the words moved like they sounded (e.g. "crawled" crawled and "telescope" telescoped), or I'd cut it out entirely.  I was a little unhappy with how I was somewhat inconsistent with the usage of this technique.

If I started over, I'm honestly not sure what I would change.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  I think my piece conveys what I want it to convey (although, feedback pending, that may change).  It doesn't look very flashy or pretty, but that wasn't the point.  I guess it ultimately did what I wanted it to do, and that's all I can ask.

In a sense, I get to "start over" when I do my final project, and for that I will do something different, albeit still very text-heavy and reliant more on the words and they way they change on screen than on pretty picture-animations that could accompany them.