EXP: Getting Paid/ Welcome To The Real World

We submitted our lifting tower finals today, and I am really unhappy about the finals. I created four different scenes as I was asked by the client (Jimmy from Loman) to do. It was then suggested by the animators that I make them move slightly, so as a result all of my contributions became hand drawn gifs which I was really proud of.

 It was then handed over to the animators to mask onto the lifting tower and render, and this is the part where I am absolutely furious over. The work I have done was left til last mintue to render and became very very  pixelated in comparison. Despite labelling my finals as finals in the google drive, they used draft pieces of my work to put in the finals, and I feel like it's let me down and that it's let the client down. 

(The one put into the final vs the one I designed for the final) 
  

The attitude working alongside them was positive on the whole but they had reluctance into letting myself and the graphic designer design characters for them. Instead insisting that we all animate our own things, despite myself and the graphic designer only been lightly trained in after effects (hence my decision to hand animate on photoshop and make gifs). We were cut out of meetings and I do feel like that hindered us a whole (as the animators had a trip to manchester in the week, nothing was passed to Graphic designer and myself). 

I accepted this challenge thinking it would further my skills in animation more, and to some extent it did. Im really comfortable with animating gifs now and I put a lot of thought into their compositions which helped me as a practitioner. I'm not unhappy that I participated in this project, I feel like it's a fantastic opportunity to see how my characters can work in the real world. I just feel let down at the quality of my own work that has gone forward compared to what could have gone forward. My idea's can still be seen within our finals that animators chose to take on (snake, fox jumping into snow, sprite hanging from lights were all my contributions to the project) Our finals as a whole are a wonderful collaboration of ideas that came from all of us, the only problem being that they were majority drawn by the animators, when in reality they should have been concept designed by myself and the graphic designer and  then animated by the animators as thats what would happen in the industry. 

I usually work well within teams, I am more than happy to surrender my work to others in order for it to go forward as whole and I enjoy contributing but this has really been a challenge for me, an education to the real world if you will. Moving forward from this, I think perhaps I need to inhabit the confidence to really put my foot down and argue my case. This has been a real introduction to working within in a collab and i think that it's just taught me that I need to be more direct with my approach when working with others. 

E V E N T   N I G H T  L A U N C H 

This actually went well, there was a decent turnout of college students and passers by to watch it get turned on. Our work was the first sequence to be shown (and my hand made gif was at the start) so it was really nice to see. I think if I were to make it again I'd have probably used more white because that really popped in comparison to the green. 
The link to the website with a video on is here to see some of them move and hear Jimmy talk about it in more detail > http://christmas.welcometoleeds.co.uk/waggon-lifting-hoist-projections/