Monday 18 May 2009

Obsessive planning + the unexpected = tense conclusion

It was the big bad assessment hand-in for all us 4th Years at 5pm on Friday, and for me it was nothing more than a big anti-climax, but those last few days sure were tense/hard-work/exciting!!! (Especially the last 30 minutes)...

I had spent the final week working desperately hard trying to finish my animation as soon as possible so that my sound designer could begin synching the sounds before Friday, but that took me until 8am on Thursday... After working all of Wednesday night to get the animation complete I began selecting a bunch of video clips to document my production process on the DVD presentation, and then I spent all of Thursday evening until Friday afternoon preparing my work for assessment. (All I had to do was print a bunch of notes, bind 6 production diaries, and design/print the DVD disc label and case sleeve - but it somehow took over 12 hours! And I only expected it to take a couple of hours!!!)
In the end I had to make-do with a basic job on the creation of my DVD (which I'm quite disappointed about), I had to do a rushed job regarding the design of the DVD presentation, and even after everything was complete and checked a hundred times I still felt the need to double check everything again and again...
I was so concerned about the presentation of all my work and making sure that I had everything ready to deliver that I became oblivious to the amount of time it takes to get to Edinburgh and how serious the deadline is supposed to be: so much so that as I left the house my dad pessimistically queried whether I had enough time to get there. It was only then that I begin to realise my misjudgment and feel anxious, but once I got in the car everything seemed fine again... (Mathematically, it would take 20mins to get to the P&R, 25mins to get into the city centre, and 15 mins to get into college, which from the time of leaving home at 15:30 would give me 30 mins spare). However just as the bus was pulling up to my stop 20 mins away from college at 16:30, the bus driver decided to change his route and really test my patience!!!
Instead of the usual route along George Street (where I'd usually get off), the bus driver for some unknown reason decided to ignore the route and head along Queen Street directly to the bus station without stopping once. (When he began doing this it was 16:35, and would take me about 15 minutes to walk to college, giving me 10 mins spare; but it was almost 16:40 before I got off the bus at the bus station, and from there it takes 19 minutes to walk to college - which would leave me seconds to hand everything in!!!)
Luckily, with a whole lot of route planning and power walking across the roadwork-ravaged city I managed to make it into my studio at college with 4 minutes to spare, and thanks to all the meticulous planning/obsessive checking that I had done over the last 30-odd hours all I had to do at that point was to empty everything out my bag and plonk it down on the table.

Job done.

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