Reflection:

I feel that a lot can be said about the work, both good and bad.  Unfortunately, I have a natural tendency to bias myself against thinking my work is good except in cases which I want someone to provide their own critique (like the editing note in Module 2).

Right off the bat the biggest regret that I have about the piece is that I was not able to get splining in the animation in order to make it smoother.  This problem is a product of both a time constraint and a mistake with the blocking.  The time constraint is that I do not believe that I could get a quality animation processed in time for the presentation if I tried to spline the animations, as there are a few hiccups in the animation blocking which works as a blocked animation, yet seems to fail once it is splined.

The other major problem is one of forgetting one of the rules when it comes to animating a rig.  I moved the entire rig around during the first few frames I posed, which means that if I splined it it would possibly make the walk cycle look horridly out of synch.  Because of this aesthetic problem, I felt it was best if I kept it blocked out, as it would be a problem that would require potentially reanimating an entire sequence, and could be considered the major failure of the piece.

Deliverywise I feel that the message is a bit vague.  Ignoring render quality, the cuts do convey a sense of time, yet at the same time my character designs for the younger and older versions did not convey that timeskip well enough in the important cut.  They did not look old enough, although I also attribute that to a lack of attire change in the characters to make the timeskip stronger.  Although I did note earlier that that cut suggests that the other cuts are also possibly significant timeskips, it really depends on the strength of the major timeskip.  When I received some feedback about the GIF, I noticed that the change in age was not terribly obvious in the clip.  And since it depends on that timeskip to give the message, it could be considered a failure on my part on creating enough distinction to give away the main point of the piece in meaning.

On the better side, there are two points which I would think I made that was okay.  In the initial cut, I made the female character to a jump spin into facing the male character.  Although it is just blocked out, I think that I may have captured the motion of someone spinning around in a jump and landing in such a way.  Although the anticipation and landing recoil is a bit limited, I did not want to make the clip seem too cartoony with squash and stretch, instead opting to try to match movement to a shallower wave pattern.  Obviously the clip needs cleaning up, but as a first try with animating such a drastic change in angle in a model, I feel like it is a start.

The second is that I feel that the piece actually may succeed as a digital performance piece.  Because the cuts are dynamic and in the scene, instead of a simple change in camera, it demands viewer attention.  If I had sold the timeskips strongly enough, I may have also been able to convince others of the potential for other meaningful and significant timeskips in the not so obvious clips.  But since such a potential for getting a message across through visual interaction, interactivity as seen in module 3's readings, exists, it does mean that it may succeed as an interactive installation if the piece was cleaned up a bit more.

Finally, the GIF aspect really has me torn.  On one side, the on fours animation and low quality makes it seem like GIF material, as well as taking advantage of the circular nature of the GIF as a new layer of meaning through a transition, but at the same time it is a short GIF, and it is in a lower quality.  It also has no way of tracking or monetizing spreadability, so technically it fails Module 2.  But as a GIF I believe that has much more potential to be spread due to the ease of sharing GIFs compared to other video content.

Overall I am a bit torn about my final product.  On one hand I do believe that my intention is there, but I did not sell the intention as strongly as I wanted it too.  In summary, as a starting off point for a cleaner animation, I feel like it is adequate.  It just requires a few more frames inserted in between, a few more extreme poses and character modeling, and possibly some sound to accompany for information, but by then it would just be a 14 second youtube video or a vine, the latter which I am uncertain of the ease of spreadability, the former being iffy due to the short nature of the clip.