At the end of the semester, we were fortunate to be involved as assistants to help year 2 students with their projects. I enjoyed being assigned to work with another year 1 student, Mingyu, on student Bhavna’s project, which was a live-action video and a character drawing. Within two weeks, I was able to help student Bhavna complete her live-action video shoot and character turnaround drawing. Bhavna’s project was a 2D animation about what would happen if a daughter came to raise her mother. Her character designs and storyboards were very nice, and I learned a lot from her animation experience. Bhavna needed our help with the live-action video, in terms of composition and camera movement. During the shoot, Mingyu and I played the mother and daughter respectively, following the storyboard sequence. This task was very challenging for me and Mingyu. We needed to show the state of the daughter and the mother with our facial expressions and body language. In the beginning, we could not perform well, and our movements and expressions were not very precise. However, Bhavna guided us patiently, and she deeply understood the different levels of expression and body language, which made me learn a lot.

After that, we completed the drawing of the character. The task was that Bhavna drew a sketch of the character first, and then we colored it according to the sketch. Mingyu and I divided up the work before drawing, each of us was responsible for drawing one character, which made us much more efficient. However, I was unfamiliar with the brushes that Bhavna was using initially, so I finished very slowly. But after some time, I mastered the use of this brush and successfully finished the sketch. I think this work was very fulfilling and I was really happy to be able to help the second graders with their work. The process also allowed me to familiarize myself with the tasks required to make a piece of work and how they should be completed step by step.