My biggest piece of advice for this class would be to take pride in your work. I’ve put varying degrees of effort into different assignments throughout the semester, and always ended up being happiest with the work that really pushed my limits. My ongoing project though the semester was making animated GIFs from different movies. Going into this assignment, I really had no idea what I was doing – I made my first GIF a week before I decided on the project. I had to learn a lot about GIF software and video file editing, but I’m glad that I did it. The biggest thing I learned was that basically any question you have has already been answered somewhere on the internet, all you have to do is search for it. If that fails, Jim Groom probably knows.

My other piece of advice would be to give yourself plenty of time to do assignments. You might have everything planned out, and it might seem simple, but you never know when a computer will decide to freeze up, delete everything, or throw an unexpected error at you. In pretty much every assignment, I hit some unexpected complication that ended up taking a lot more time than I planned. But as I said before, the most difficult assignments were the ones that I was most proud of in the end. Usually, there was a point where I could scrap the idea I had and settle for something simpler. In some cases, I did this. However, when I really worked at following through with a good idea, that’s when I was happiest with the final product.

Sincerely,
Eric Schmieg