0R10N - Robot Animation

This is my animation, 0R10N, for the robot arm project. It took me a while but I feel like overall it went alright.

Successes:

• Animation- I think I did an overall decent job with animating the robot (0R10N) itself. It took some time for me to get used to parenting objects it was picking up (balls to throw, in this case) but I managed to get the hang of it eventually.
• Scene modeling- I wanted to catch the atmosphere of an empty, almost lonely office building late at night, and I think I did a decent job with it. My last full animation (pendulum) originally had a very simple and bleak setting, so I wanted to avoid that by putting some thought into the layout of the scene for this animation. I tried to coordinate the colors and shapes used in the scene without making it too overwhelming.
• Adding onto that, I'm pretty proud of the fact that I didn't use Blend Swap for anything. (I mean, of course I have nothing against people who did use it! That's not the message I'm trying to give off.) I'm just proud that I was able to take the idea of the scene in my imagination and replicate it through my efforts in modeling. 
• Storyline- I don't think I executed the storyline perfectly (see Focus in 'Difficulties') but I am proud of the fact that I was able to not only envision a story, but also depict it in my plot rollercoaster and storyboard, giving thought to how it would flow through the characters and the camera movements.
• Creativity- In general I feel as if I took more risks with this project as compared to the pendulum animation: I attempted a more complicated plot, I originally planned to create human-like entities (the Shadows, who I later decided in the process should be replaced with Ominous Floating Cubes), and I tried out a more complex setting.
• Budgeting time- I think I did a better time with budgeting time when compared to the pendulum animation. Not perfect, that's for sure, but I tried to keep myself from avoiding working on the parts of the scene I wanted to avoid, and I tried harder to budget my time accordingly so I had enough time sorted to model and animate the scene. I also took time to work on the project at home. And I did some changes, in particular changing the Shadows to Ominous Floating Cubes, in order to give myself enough time.

Difficulties:

• Sheer overambition- 0R10N did not quite live up to what I envisioned in my head. I think I was overconfident in my ability to execute everything. For example, the scene itself took longer than I would've liked to model.
• The Shadows: My original plan was to have the antagonists of 0R10N be the ominous Shadows who lurk in the darkness and attempt to steal the book of classified knowledge. However, this endeavor not only wasted more time than I would like to admit, but it was also overly ambitious and would've taken far too much time to animate anyway. So I replaced them with the Ominous Floating Cubes, which still worked out fine, even if I felt like they weren't as cool.
• Technical errors- A few of these.
• I always end up making my walls/windows/ceilings/etc. in one way or another and by the time I've finished animating everything and rendered it out, I go over what I've done, and I can see slips of that black space peeking out from behind objects, which I had previously not noticed in normal material mode. It's something that always seems to slip by me.
• At 0:13, to the left, out the window, you can see a sliver of the void.
• At the very end around 1:01, when the camera pans out, you can no longer see the background outside the window.
• At 0:39 the camera passes through what I assume is the wall. Oops.
• Ball bounce- I can admit that I have never been great at animating fluid motion like a ball bounce, but these were not very well executed despite my attempts to make them look better. Next time I will try to envision what kind of ball is being used (ex. tennis) and then look up a video of it being bounced so that I have a better understanding of how its motion works.
• Floating book- I'm on the fence about this one. When the big Ominous Floating Cube "picks up" the book, I wanted it to be kind of like a Veggie Tales thing. Because the Cube does not have limbs, it picks things up with its mind. I think it was kind of weird to keep it floating there, but maybe it worked to help give everything a more ominous or even high-tech feeling?  
• Focus- I tried to tell a comprehensible and interesting story, but I didn't think it quite turned out how I'd hoped. And as a result of me attempting to concentrate on the storyline more, I think the focus left the robot (0R10N) itself, despite the fact that the robot is supposed to be the focus of the animation.
• Timing- The beginning shots of the animation are very slow and give the audience almost too much time to process the events, while the later parts of the animation are more rushed and almost feel too quick.