Planning

Planning was an important aspect to this project and so I chose to create and keep and document through which I could plan my time management, highlight priority and keep up to date. This is what it looks like:

I have used the intensity of the colour to show how important that section is. The darker and more vibrant the colour the more important that task is at that time. This of course was only a rough estimate and as you can see I slipped behind quite a lot around the 29th of April.

My thought process behind this was to get the website out of the way first. I had no idea how to code a website by hand and I knew that I had somewhat of an idea of how to build the iBook. All my tutors said I should build them both side by side but I knew that for me that wouldn't work. I need to focus on one thing at a time in order to get results I am happy with. 

I wanted to code the website first because I knew that I would have to learn it from scratch. I could see myself trying to do both at once or doing the iBook first and running out of time to do the website and panicking. To avoid that I allocated the majority of my time to building the website and put that first. That way I could gauge how long it was going to take me and if the need arose I could half way through begin work on the iBook. That is was the "Prepare assets and content." starting April 22nd is for. If I felt the need at that point I could have started work on the iBook.

As you can see though, I did slip behind. I am a massive perfectionist. It's a curse. I sit in-front of After Effects and Photoshop changing one value by 1% either way for hours. I can't decide if a cut should be one frame earlier or later in Premiere Pro and in web I could play for months. That is why I slipped behind. It is because of my last page. I spent ages drawing all of those vector images and coding the jQuery to get them to animate. That ate up time however, it wasn't really slipping behind in the conventional sense. I wasn't sure to what detail I was going to draw the animals. I could have summarised each species with one drawing them moved on. In my planning I wanted to draw a few of each species and i felt it would make for a more fulfilling learning experience and also fill out the iBook a little more. In the end I decided to go all out and draw a few species for each section. This is the main reason for me falling behind because it meant the website took longer to complete however, I was still technically drawing assets for the iBook which meant that that was a lot quicker to build and could have a lot more content.

Overall I think I planned my time very well and I am definitely glad that I didn't try to make both products at the same time or do the iBook first as I think it would have severely compromised the website and the overall success of both projects. Doing the website first allowed me to see what content worked where and make tables and charts and embed video in the right spot. This worked well on the site and transferred perfectly to the iBook. If I did the iBook first, I ca't help but think that, that wouldn't have been the case.