BA8 Self Evaluation

BA8 Self Evaluation

I felt overall BA8 was a very challenging project. I had to use various new methods to counter problems in putting it together, within the technological side of it as well as outsourcing my work to other people who could do the things I couldn’t learn to do in the projects time frame. I feel through this I gained some valuable knowledge on running a position where I am able to delegate work to others, while often streamlining the work process.

I found this gave me a good experience in team management. While the majority of the people I worked with were already existing friends I still had to learn when to be firm with what I needed but also learn to comprise on what was technically feasible. With Matt Owen, who produced all the animations of my spaceships. There was much negotiation on what would be possible due to time and his skillset regarding the work. Much was the same with Ben Mill and Vincenzo Prestigiacomo who produced the projects music. I wrote briefs of their work for the project containing guide lines and expectations of the final outcome of each track. The only problem during the outsourcing was for my Emblems who John Buxley created. And was mainly due to time management as well communication difficulties due to timezone which led to the final product being a month later than expected, this also made me consider how to communicate my ideas but also how to plan around the needs of others,

My work and role in the project as creative director of the project was more demanding than initially suspected, whole having to produce the core body of work alongside directing the rest of the team was a learning experience and I found it taught me to very quickly clarify my intentions and ideas from my team.

I also found that despite my intentions and advanced designs featured in my BA7 I still had to make edits and compromises with my project. Such as I had planned to have five ships for each faction, in the end had to cut this and restructure the narrative so that the Sol Confederacy and Shakti Protectorate were the two main factions while the other factions would have less ships but perhaps would be developed further in a future build of the project after university. Other things I found having to compromise on was the default two environment per faction, while however I did manage to outsource two environments to Ben Mills, which allowed me to see individual takes on my concepts and throw back and forth ideas evolving the project. This was mainly down to personal time management, however it helped me gain confidence with putting the more creative side of the project in the hands of others.

In regards to my research report I feel confident in what I submitted but I still felt I could have taken further imitative with personal investigation and using secondary research to prove the validity of primary research and sources. As well as deep research to build a more consistent source base to write about rather that covering multiple sources in small detail and applying it to the relevance to the overall question of the essay. As well as I feel an essay focusing on comparison between qualitative a large sources may have been more effective towards my grade.

In conclusion BA8 have given me some fundamental experience in not only project management, but has also has helped honed my social skills when interacting with others in a working environment. While I still need to learn to plan more effectively I find working within a team can assist these issues, through delegation and communication and general teamwork as well as the ability to negotiate comprise when needed.